Merlin fic: Stars in the Still Water

[inheritedjeans]

Title: Stars in the Still Water
Category: Canon AU, Arthur/Merlin pre-slash, hurt-comfort
Warnings: graphic violence
Words: ~10k

Summary: Merlin carries many secrets, but he thinks this will be the one to break him: That he knows what Arthur and his men did to that Druid camp all those years ago, because he was there. Because he was that massacre's only survivor.

AN: Huge thanks to domnomnom and alasweneverdo for punching this fic (and me) into shape.



1.

A boy careens through the forest, running fleet and fast and reckless; a lost little boy running under trees too tall to let the moonlight shine through, so small and lost and scared. Scared, because behind him (right behind him, a pressure at his heels, a nipping, gnawing, biting at his heels) runs Another. Faster than him, with legs strong and a chest of shining iron strength. And then -

- his eyes close (or have they always been closed, and he’s only now understanding how blindly he runs) and he can’t open them again. They are weighted down and heavy; weighted down and burdened with the fear of knowing (he can’t see, so none can show him and so he will never know, never, no) exactly what he runs through, so he runs sightless through a forest of iron and rust, tripping against fallen trees and stumbling fast through the deep of wet moss.

The night lies dark and heavy over the forest, the dark forest full of gnashing teeth and terror and ghosts who whistle silver songs that shiver through the running, stumbling, stuttering boy. His legs pull him heavy to the ground (get up, get up) and bend him low at his knees as he runs, runs, runs. His eyes won’t open and his legs won’t straighten out; won’t move as they ought.

(Behind him, faster and faster, gaining as he crashes against trees and struggles to lift his legs and run, comes Another.)

Wet panting floods his ears, and the sucking noise of a man plated all in metal running through ankle deep gore rushes closer -

closer

- right behind him (nearer still and louder, louder) runs the knight of Camelot. Wind sings past the knight’s sword, and it drips with blood, the blood of thousands. The knight smiles (wide and hungry) with his mouth all smeared with the blood he drinks like wine -

the boy knows; sees the colour on the knight’s snarling, smiling mouth, even though his eyes are shut and he should be sightless, still he sees the knight

- and there, right behind him, sword bright and held so high -

wait.

No, this isn’t right. This isn’t right at all.

(This is a dream, this is that dream again. He will wake up. He will wake up NOW.)

The dream lies thick upon him. He runs and pants with ragged edges; he runs and stumbles and still can’t open his eyes - he just needs to open his eyes, OPEN THEM - and he fights. He thrashes and fights and runs and falls (hands wet upon the moss, sinking deep through the cold and slimy moss) and still his eyes won’t open.

The sun breaks through the trees - or is that the moon, bright and white and piercing? - and brightens the forest. So much light it burns him, as he drags his eyelids up and up and -

-they open.

Merlin blinks. Night lies close around him still, as he scrambles up onto his elbows and coughs out a strangled breath, head heaving up and down. The stream cutting through the forest shines dark blue in the starlight and runs noisily around a bend he can’t see. He stands, hand pressed tight against a rough tree trunk; shaky, shivering.

The night lies still and silent and the forest opens before him, wide and guileless. The trees stretch tall above him. Their leaves shiver in the silent wind, and it is the sound of an inescapable foreknowing.

Because this has happened before. All of it. He has waited beside this stream and panted, thrown his eyes around and worried, so many times before. He is small, he is young and he is green, and the world spins fast around him. Merlin knows these steps - he knows what will now come. What will always come.

The trees shiver tall above him and he runs.

Short legs working fast, because Merlin is a young boy, tripping over his own legs for trying to run faster than he could possibly go, because there bursts an excitement in his belly that spreads jitters through his hands. The sun will rise -

it always does

- with a pale blush of colour, and it will soak the tree leaves with shine, and he will hurry back to camp so that he can curl up beside his brother-friend and warm his throat with breakfast. Maybe fish - yes, it is always fish, always and forever fish, because this is the day he goes fishing in the morning, and that is Important.

He traipses through the trees, between the trees, because an excitement burns through his belly - straight through his belly, heavy and dry and hot - and suffuse his arms with fluttering. His arms that shake, that tremble because they are heavy, that are weighted down and tired.

He looks down to his hands and sees - of course - the string of fish hanging from the knot cutting rope burns into his palms.

It is important that there is fish hanging from the rope in this little boy’s hand. There is always fish.

The boy runs through the forest, the dark forest still spread with night, the dark forest full of gnashing teeth and terror.

His feet (panic leeching through his mind, because he runs but he is slow, and he can’t quite find his feet) trip against the litter of rotting tree carcasses. His feet - he can’t lift them, he must lift them higher but he cannot, so he trips and stumbles; stumbles more than his almost-uncle did when he had his fill of mulled wines.

(The Other is chasing, The Other is faster, faster than the boy could ever be with those clumsy feet of his, so he must go faster faster FASTER.)

Red sucks his feet down, through the moss, feet sinking and sliding down and he can’t lift them, can’t fight against the suction, the sucking wrench of gore that holds him down. He can’t move, can’t run, and he hears it behind him - the singing of air against a drawn blade and the loud grimace of hatred slashing the knight’s face clean in two.

Merlin, the scared child wrapped up in a cloak too big for him - but you will grow into it, Iowerth had said to him when handing it over, in your time with us. - falls to the ground, hands sinking fast down through the moss gone dark with blood, feeling the wet of a massacre beneath him.

The knight of Camelot catches him right there, in a mountain of noise and colour, saying (with a voice deep and dark and heavy like the stonework of his foul castle), “Come, boy, I’ll show you, boy - come and see what your prophesied coming has amounted to.”

The knight’s hand presses rough on his head, leather glove pulling on his hair, stinging pricks of tears to his eyes (his closed and shuttered eyes, because this happens always and he never wants to see) as the knight turns him; twists him around and around to see -

to see

- carnage lain open upon a hill (eyes closed, but he can still see anyway, flimsy film of skin too weak to hold back the strength of the red, dead blood). Tents flap, torn, in the foul wind, stained and heavy with blood, and they draw his gaze down, down. Down to the piles of corpses, flesh gaping open, faces screaming, screaming still, and he can hear them, hear their shrill voices asking, Where were you, Emrys, you were supposed to save us; you were supposed to make us safe. Swords bloodied up to their pommels spear countless palms to the ground, splaying men and women and children out helpless, pain rupturing the thread of their magic.

Merlin - a child lost, promised to the druids and made safe against Camelot in their hold - screams, but there is no noise; there is only silence pressing in around him, though his throat works and aches and shreds itself to pieces.

Silence, as the knight holds him to watch the snap of bloodied banners in the wind.

“And now,” he says, “it’s your turn.”

Merlin jerks at the force of the sword gutting him and -

- awakes.

2.

Linen shifts rough against Merlin’s skin, grabs onto the soak of his sweat as he lurches up onto his elbows. Merlin pants. The dry air rubs sorely at his throat - hurt from suppressing his screams (because he cannot let them find him, hide, he must hide) and tacky with imagined blood.

A dream. Again, the same dream.

Merlin barks out a few sobs that could almost pass for laughter and collapses onto his back, arms trembling. A cramp pulls the muscles in his calf tight together. He grits his teeth and stretches through it, concentrating on the ache and the burn and trying to forget how once upon a time, he had been a lost little boy who shivered his way through cramping muscles for hours, waiting, hidden in the well of Albion’s magic as Camelot slaughtered his kin.

He waits, in a vigil horribly familiar to him, for the sun to rise.

--

Magic buzzes in his ears - suppress, suppress, push it back down, suppress - and blurs the rough red weave of the fabric in his hands. A crackle shivers down Merlin’s spine, and this time, maybe this time he can save them. Save them all. He can feel his magic, right there, thick at his fingertips and sparking under his nails. So maybe this time (he thinks, as he sees the red and remembers, losing everything to his remembering) he can -

“Merlin? Meeeeer-liiiiiiiin.” Arthur - wearing a frown and nearly, very nearly, looking concerned as he leans close in to Merlin’s face - waves a hand in front of Merlin’s nose. Merlin jumps back, Arthur’s voice washing cold through his body and fettering his magic safely away.

Because he doesn’t need any magic, here. Because he no longer sits, cramped tight in the hollow of that old tree and wrapped inescapably in the bounds of Albion’s will, watching and watching as those knights of Camelot -

- no, no, NO.

“Hmm?” Merlin ekes out, a bit cracked and a bit broken, but heavily.

Arthur grumbles a bit and lurches forward, thwacking Merlin clear across the top of his head.

“Hey!” Merlin barks out. “Ow, what did I do, your prattliness?”

This is Arthur, after all. Most likely he has imagined an offense and assigned it firmly to Merlin’s person. And even though he had again woken shaking from another nightmare last night, Merlin is going to have a Normal Day. He will do Normal Things, and somehow that has come to mean that he will make a dismal effort at completing the chores Arthur sets out for him and arguing constantly over ridiculous imagined slights.

And yes, Arthur has dropped any feelings of concern he might have had right off his face and now wears only that determined, hard-eyed stare - the one that Merlin has learned to love.

Or rather, fear. More often fear. Yeah.

Merlin sighs. He’s been rather hopeless as of late, but when Arthur stares at him like that - brow slightly furrowed, eyes narrowed until they are clear and blue and firm, leaning forward so his focus is on Merlin, can only be on Merlin - it’s hard to remember all the reasons why being so hopeless is a bad, very very bad, idea.

Looking at the cape in his hands reminds him, though.

“Merlin, I expect you to dress me, not clutch my cloak in your hands like a blushing maiden.”

Arthur rips the cloak - red, so very Camelot red - from Merlin’s fingers and fastens the leather ties at his throat as he hurries down the hall. His worn war cloak today. He’s had that cloak for years, for so many years, and Merlin knows this because -

- because. Well, no need to think like that, not now, please not now.

Sunshine breaks through the narrow archer’s slit in the wall and cuts across Arthur, lighting him up with a soft brilliance. Golden everything - his hair, the glow rising from his skin, the sparse decorative buckling along his sword sheath catching the light and spinning it into something more bright than Merlin can bear to look at. Chainmail shines and the soft leather gloves Arthur pulls over his hands bend soft around his fingers as he flexes them.

This is the part that pulls Merlin’s lungs tight together and punches the air clear from his lungs (but silently, ever silent, lest they catch him, these Camelot men, and eat him up whole). Arthur stands before him, eyebrow tilted high and hand held out, imperial to the core of his bones, and he looks so familiar that Merlin cannot stand it. He looks like every figure who ever tore through the landscape of his nightmares and who still sit heavy as a wine stain upon the darkest corners of Merlin’s memory.

He looks so very nearly exactly as he had once looked in a grove far from here, years ago and leagues away. As he had looked, cape heavy and too wide to fit properly around his shoulders, listing awkwardly off the side of his horse, while he had watched the rest of Camelot’s honoured knights slaughter every man and woman and child they saw before them who wasn’t wrapped in red. And just as Arthur had watched in silence, Merlin had watched Arthur - the golden prince of Camelot, newly knighted and still almost as much of a boy as Merlin had been himself - with his teeth clenched together tight enough to spawn an ache that pulsed from his jaw to his temples for days afterwards. Merlin, the little Druid boy, had listened to the wailing and the dying and had felt alone with the strange, sad prince.

Arthur looks every bit the warrior of Camelot he has ever been, and Merlin still can’t stop wanting him.

(Traitor.)

3.

Green springs shallowly from the trees, bending light into a soft furl that Merlin can’t help but turn his face into; close his eyes and bask in the sweet swell of summer. So it isn’t until they’ve already stopped that Merlin sees where they are.

They stop in a grove welled deep with power and pain, and Merlin knows it. Knows this place well, the lines of every tree burned into his mind; the hills and the shallows, the curve of the earth; the flap of linen in the breeze cauterizing the hurt from so long ago. This is sacred land. This is a graveyard, and -

“Arthur, we shouldn’t be here.” Words - are those his own? - break through the air; the air so heavy with memory that it falls upon them like a burdened yoke and refuses to move. “We really, really shouldn’t be here.” Merlin hears himself speak and dimly notes the anger settled just beneath his voice.

The anger, the fear, the bitter cloy of remembrance.

Arthur turns to Merlin with a smile still thick upon his face from watching his knights argue light-heartedly.

“What are you worried about this time, Merlin?” Arthur says.

“Just - come here.”

Merlin lurches away from Arthur - stumbling much like he once had ages ago, over the same ancient roots and unexpected hollows - and wonders at the tilt of the earth. (Or is that just the weight of all the years he’s spent ignoring this site, hanging around his neck and pulling him low?) In a daze, Merlin leads Arthur through the trees to the glade he can’t forget.

(And Arthur, he should remember too. Arthur, who had sat upon his horse at this very site, eyes wide and face so pale Merlin thought him a ghost made flesh. Arthur, who had been a boy too small for the sword he bore at his side, hidden in a scabbard and ignored for so long that Merlin, a boy hiding and watching and scared, had loved him for it. Had loved the knight all in red who thought himself caught in a nightmare just as much as Merlin had.)

“This is a shrine,” Merlin says, and he must do this carefully (careful, careful, lest they catch him for a warlock, these Camelot men, and burn him for daring to breathe) and yet he must do this firmly. “In the days of the Old Religion, people would set up these shrines to appease restless spirits.”

Here, the things he doesn’t say flutter wild against his chest, beating at his throat with angry fists and crawling sickeningly around in his mouth, but he won’t let them go: Not just the days of the Old Religion - even now people do this. And, Do you know how many have gone up since the start of your father’s Purge? And, Do you know how long I had to work here, in this grove, to tear enough of my camp’s linens to catch all of the spirits born of violence? Do you have any idea how long I had to kneel in the blood and dirt and piss, working at tying so many knots? Do you know how long it took me to scrub that blood off my skin? It soaked too deep; I carried your violence around on my palms and my knees for months.

He doesn’t say any of it. He doesn’t let his magic (clawing and clamouring, because isn’t this so familiar, knights caped in red, irreverent and crass as they jest about ghosts) writhe out and wrap around Gwaine’s neck when he jumps out at Merlin’s shoulder.

(This is where his kin were murdered and they joke about their spirits.)

“This isn’t funny! You can’t, you shouldn’t - something horrible - “ voice cracking, shaking, breaking, “something terrible happened here, and that’s why someone had to put up a shrine.” Merlin very carefully doesn’t say, Don’t you remember, Arthur? You were here, you know what happened, you should understand but you won’t. “We need to go before we set something free.”

A snap behind him, and Merlin jumps, heart high and bursting in his chest. The earth sways around him and he grits his eyes tight, fighting down the nausea that squirms thick in his belly. He shivers and begs the gods to give Arthur the will to leave.

“Fine,” Arthur says. “Let’s go before the faint-hearted among us die from fear.”

And Merlin thinks he could hate Arthur; that it would be so easy to just close his eyes and hate him (because he can see the red of Camelot at his throat and hear the horrible mocking slant in his voice and it would be easy to just hate him and hate him and hate him) but he can’t. Sunlight filters through the leaves and hazes gently over Arthur’s hair; catches at the corner of his mouth and flicks golden over the arch of his lashes. Merlin sees Arthur standing tall and silent, beckoning his knights away from the grove that has Merlin shaking (trembling and remembering) with his eyes soft and warm as he looks at Merlin; tilts an eyebrow and says without saying a thing, Is this enough? Have I fixed it for you?

So no, Merlin can’t hate Arthur. Can’t do aught but love him, slow and sweet and deep; slow and aching and sharp with bitter. His Camelot knight who sat atop his horse in this grove and looked more horrified than even Merlin had felt.

Merlin nods and calms as he walks back to the horses, mounts up, and rides out behind his king, admiring how Arthur bows his head as they pass by the twisting strips of linen and trying to ignore the crawling of magic through his bones. He is safe, Merlin is safe, and he does not need to hide away this time. Not like he had had to before, pressed into the well of a tree and hiding in the wrap of his magic and the magic of the earth.

Horse hooves toss up the bracken and it is green. Completely green.

4.

A joke on the training field (remember, today will be Normal and he will be Fine everything will be okay and he will Forget) and the day is undone.

Because he was reading, Merlin had said. Why had he said that - he knows how Arthur reacts to anything and everything. Merlin knew that this would happen, and yet he had said it anyway. (Stupid, stupid.)

Wind rises high around him, whistles through the gap in his helmet and shrieks around his ears, and Arthur (knight of Camelot, metal ringed around his torso - a child of the Sword who suckled on the teat of Warfare) slamming into him again and again. The sword beats a horrible rhythm against Merlin’s shield, and each hit jars his shoulder more and more, until he falls (helpless, get up get up get up) and it’s over.

Calm down. Calm, settle, calm - this is a safe place, Merlin whispers to the edging panic in his mind; to the dark leech of power through his veins.

He is in King Arthur’s Camelot, so he is fine. He must be fine.

Merlin looks up at Elyan and cringes before the first blow lands. Elyan’s eyes flare wild, so dark and deep that he looks like an Otherworld dead thing as he beats Merlin into the ground -

(fine fine fine everything is fine Elyan will back off, will never hurt Merlin, so all Merlin must do is wait and he is so very good at waiting, just keep the shield high and block it out; block it ALL OUT)

- until Arthur calls, “Enough!” and wrestles Elyan’s arms into stillness.

Clouds darken the sky and he can’t smell blood. He can’t.

5.

“Here, you must be thirsty.” Merlin’s heart thumps loudly, and he can feel something; can feel someone, there at his back.

The forest presses wet around him. Moonlight drips slick down the trees and splits a line between Merlin and Elyan. Elyan, who makes to take the water skin Merlin holds out, just as easily as he had taken the warm winter cloak and the pack of food, but stops and stares behind Merlin’s back. He deadens around his eyes and begins to twitch and then stand even more still than before, no longer panting as he had been from their run from the castle jails. Ice spins through Merlin and he knows the spirit it carries. Long ago in the days in which his family had sprawled wide and away of what it now is - when he had friends and admirers and when Iowerth had held him tight and warmed him even as the cold of missing his mother had chased the heat from his bones.

“No - leave him alone! You’ve no reason to take him.”

“You know why I’m here, Emrys,” the ghost-boy says with Elyan’s mouth, a double voice of ice and warmth, death and life twined together. Merlin shudders.

“My name is Merlin now. And you can’t - you should be resting, spirit.”

“You know why I’m here.” Elyan smiles, and the thin stretch of the ghost-boy’s words pull tight away from his throat. “And you know who I am, Emrys.” The deep rumble of Elyan and the thin strain of the druid; trickling snowmelt scraping against a thick bed of rock.

“I am not your Emrys, Ifan.”

“No, our Emrys was to come and save us all. What have you done, Merlin?” Elyan’s lips spread thin atop his teeth, stretched wide and held still, and yet the druid boy speaks through him. “What have you done but bowed before he who slaughtered us like animals?”

“Arthur’s not like that,” Merlin spits out, a crackle of power thrilling through his outstretched palm. The forest chills. Dully shining greenery shears soft in the cold and ice beads along the branches at Merlin’s elbow. Weak pain - sharp like ice - spears down the bones of his fingers as he holds his hand out, threatening and defensive both.

“Steady now, Merlin. I have hurt my last already, but this brave, red-cloaked knight of Camelot I wear still has such fragile flesh.”

Merlin swallows - cold splintering down his throat - and lowers his arm, shifting his shoulders underneath his coat.

“Elyan hasn’t - what you have against Camelot... He was away, he’d been travelling and serving no king. Least of all Uther.”

“And yet he has put upon himself this cloak of red,” Ifan says, tilting Elyan’s head down (awkward and unpracticed in the movement) and plucking at the fabric swaying loose about his legs. “So I would say he stands by Camelot even more wholeheartedly than any of those who had been raised within her walls.”

“But it wasn’t Camelot that wronged you!” Desperation squeezes through Merlin’s voice.

Elyan’s head snaps up and Ifan says, “That wronged us, Emrys. Or have you forgotten so easily?”

(Pressed tight against the clawing bark of a tree, wood flaking apart under his clutching fingers, pressing himself yet further back - scrambling to get away, to hide completely in the well of Albion herself - harder and harder, bursting blood free within him that will last for months at the edges of his skin. Still for years after this day, the last ache of bone-deep bruises will be struggling to fade. He’s so sure that they will see him, they will find him and catch him, but hush now, child, I will hide you and I will keep you safe, for this is not your time, she whispers to him in multitude of voices. Hours, watching all the ways that men can defile a home and a life and can still further defile a corpse; watching the red bloom of Camelot devour his camp whole and spit it back out, ruined.)

Merlin flinches, and swallows, and worries his eyes along the crooked edges of the brush that prickles up just beside his knees, branches snapped from the passage of horses and hanging loose. His fingers twitch toward them (to snap them off, to make them straight and make them neat, keep busy and keep moving and focusing on how he dares not remember any more) until he clenches his hands into tight fists. Digs his nails into the skin of his palms and further, shifting over the stretch of tendons and trying to remember how Gaius had said they connected further in and further back, as Merlin had watched him lay neat stitches over the flayed skin of a soldier’s hand. Gaius, who taught - and still teaches - Merlin how to become a man of science.

Magic and the power of his destiny alone had not been enough before, after all.

“Of course,” Merlin says into the silence. “You know me, Ifan. You know I would never forget what they did to us. But that wasn’t Arthur! That was his father, and his father’s Camelot. Arthur is a better man.” Merlin nods (wondering if this is him trying to convince Ifan or himself) and pulls his lips up into a smile that shakes quickly off his face again. “Arthur will make a better Camelot, you’ll see.”

Elyan - Ifan - says, slow and rolling like the first growl of thunder, “Oh, is this the Arthur you’ve been following like a shadow? With yellow hair and eyes sharp and blue? The Arthur who looked so very nearly the exact same all those years ago as he stood to the side and ordered us slaughtered? Yes, Emrys, I can see this is why we were so honoured to take you in when your mother came pleading to us. I can see why your destiny spared you while it left the rest of us to die terrified. What a great leader you’ve found, and oh, yes I can see in him a great King among men.”

“I saw him there, too,” Merlin bites out. “And I saw the fear in his eyes. He was a boy, Ifan! He was scared and helpless, just as we were. He had no part in your death.”

“He was old enough to know better. He was old enough to tell his knights to stop.”

“They weren’t his knights - they were Uther’s. Can’t you - don’t you see? He’s not living in the shadow of his father anymore. He can change, be a better man, now.”

“No, Emrys. You just don’t want to try to become the man that Iowerth Foresaw. And so nothing will change at all.”

Merlin starts at the call of an owl at his back and before he can make himself ready against Ifan again, Merlin’s flinching (too late) from Elyan’s swinging fist and falling.

6.

“This shrine,” Gaius says. “Do you think you could find it again?”

Tattered linens hanging in the trees, bleached from long years in the sun, and blood that has sunk deep into the reservoir of the earth, poisoning the waters and leeching sanity from the forest.

“Don’t make me - I can’t go back there, Gaius, don’t make me go back there.” Merlin’s voice spreads out thin and twisted, breathy and distant.

Gaius startles, eyebrows tightening together. “But my boy, we need to know what happened there. The Druids were holding back a vengeful spirit who could not find peace in the Otherworld by setting up that shrine.” (Merlin does not say, I know, and he dares not say, I was half tempted to let those spirits free to kill every knight they came across.) “But until we know who wronged them, what happened, we will never know how to set the spirit to rest.”

“Whatever you need to know, I’ll tell you,” Merlin says. He’s shaking his head, again and again and again, trying to jostle the images loose from the fronts of his eyes, but it doesn’t work - all he sees is red. “I can tell you, but I won’t go back there.”

Afternoon sunlight slants soft through the small windows half hidden in Gaius’s workroom. Merlin shifts out of Gaius’s reach, hunching into himself (staying hidden, deep inside the well of Albion’s magic, and safe) and turning his eyes down.

“Merlin, what happened to you?”

“My mother never told you? In any of her letters?” Merlin risks meeting Gaius’s eyes and cringes at the worry they show. “It was ages ago, anyway. Maybe she thought it didn’t matter.” But Merlin knows that that isn’t why she would have let the matter lie, though he can’t guess at the real reason. “I left my mother when I was only, to stay with the Druids. She said it would keep me safe, that Camelot had its eye on Ealdor, hunting for the last Dragonlord.”

Smoke spills through the room and Gaius absently tends to a potion that had boiled over, though he keeps his eyes mostly on Merlin. Merlin catches his hands together and swings them between his legs; hangs his head and speaks low from his chest.

“I travelled with them for I think six or seven years, and we sometimes went back through Essetir to visit my mother. Iowerth - she was the clan leader - she liked keeping me happy. And on one of those trips… on one of them, we cut through Camelot to get to Essetir, so we could get to Ealdor in time for Beltane. I wanted to spend it with my mother - I’d been missing her a lot that year. I used to think if I didn’t keep going back to visit, I’d forget her face. I sometimes thought I was forgetting it anyway. And on the way through Camelot… on the way…”

Merlin’s voice cracks, and Gaius makes a move to grab at his shoulders, stopping to pull the cauldron of sleeping draught off the flame. He rubs at Merlin’s back, and Merlin wants to say, it’s okay, I’m okay, it’s been years and I’m okay, but this is nice. The last time anyone had given him so much as a warm squeeze of the shoulder after Remembering had been years ago, just after a nightmare he’d had on the eve of his leaving for Camelot. His mother had hugged him as he cried, and he had begged her to let him stay with her, far away from the city built of blood and brittle bone.

But Fate has a way of setting things in motion without the consent of her players, and still to Camelot he had gone. The Once and Future King would need Emrys soon enough, after all. Iowerth made sure that Merlin knew that above all things.

“But on the way back, Uther’s men found us and they slaughtered us down to the last man, woman, and child. This spirit - his name was Ifan in life - will never find peace. Not while Uther is alive. Because Uther will never repent.”

Bitter edges along Merlin’s voice, grating it ragged at the seams between words. Gaius stops rubbing at Merlin’s back.

“You know what that means, Merlin.”

“Yes. The only way we can stop this is to kill Elyan and hope that’s enough to send Ifan on to the Otherworld.”

Heat presses thick in the room from the unstopped fires for Gaius’s potions, but neither move to put them out.

7.

Merlin hears, “I am responsible for what happened to you. And for all the violence that happened here,” and something in him breaks. No longer does he see that Arthur from so long ago - the small figure half sliding off his massive destrier, with fear chasing the beauty from his face and leaving in its stead a twisted caricature of strength - but a cruel young warlord. A commander upon his warhorse, uncaring of his seat and the set of his face both, so intent is he on the bloodshed he seeks. Merlin chokes and Remembers, everything from the wet cold soaking into his skin from the damp of the earth to the screaming and the dying and the snapping crack of bones under steel blades. Most of all, he sees that boy, the one with gold hair and wide eyes, so wide he had thought them scared, but maybe - maybe he had never been scared at all.

“ - I was desperate to prove myself - “

Maybe Arthur had ever been a cold and calculating warrior, standing back to direct his slaughter from afar.

(An often quiet, often smothered and ignored, piece of Merlin speaks up, says, no, you know him, you know him, and you love him (of course you do) too much to let him be a monster,

but an even quieter part of him spreads thick through his veins, heavy and dark. A part that has been growing strong for years; a thing of anger and lust and gluttony, and of righteous fury. The part of him that had judged Nimueh and found her wanting, and had struck her from the earth. Instinctual and perfect. This dark cancer that eats away at the golden edges of Merlin’s so recently learned love says, and yet he has ever been a monster anyway, remember, and the wrongs of the past have damned him for eternity.)

Darkness twitches along Merlin’s eye and pulls his face fully into shadow, into the black dearth of starlight spread at Arthur’s feet.

“I forgive you,” Ifan says, soft and gentle. Soft and insistent.

“Ifan, what are you doing?!” Shock pulls on Merlin’s stomach, gripping him tight and pulling and pulling and he will break; he will become a thing of terror, wearing fear about his face and carrying that cancer of anger in his heart and he will loom over the land with his belly so heavy with hatred and twisting repulsion that it will weigh him down to a lurching stumble.

“It was him” Merlin says, voice strained with the pressure he puts on it. “And you want to let him go? He killed you - he murdered us all!”

Arthur, face shining and eyes wide and blue and still so childlike from his confession of childhood sins, heaves in a gulp of air and turns to Merlin in a daze, once Ifan lets him go. Ifan, who smiles and says “I know, Emrys. And I forgive him, because he truly repents.”

“He ordered our slaughter, but after he commands your forgiveness, you give it freely? Have you forgotten what happened that day? Or did you ever really know? I watched it all - I knelt there in the blood and fear while they killed us for hours. And I couldn’t move - She held me still, wrapped in the magic of the earth, and I couldn’t do anything to save any of you, and he - ” and here, Merlin thrusts his arm out fiercely, wrenching at his shoulder from the strength of it, and jabs at Arthur, who looks shocked and scared and shattered - “ordered it all to happen. Led those men to us, and ordered us killed!”

A horrible, sad and lonely part of Merlin still writhes in wretched sympathy of Arthur’s shaking voice, small and so very sad as he says, “I never - Merlin, please, believe me, I never wanted that to happen. I ordered them to leave the women and children alone, but I didn’t - I froze, and I didn’t stop them when they started to disobey.”

Merlin laughs, hysterical, knowing that he has gone too far already; shown too many of the secrets in his hand. There will be no going back. He doesn’t think he wants there to be.

“So you ordered our mothers to be spared, but would fain have left us all fatherless? Alone, wandering around Camelot and remembering how they died, over and over till it drove us mad? We had magic, Arthur, and you’re saying you would have spared us all and let us fester until we were angry enough to try for vengeance?”

“No - that’s not what I… no, Merlin, I didn’t mean for it.” Arthur shakes and swings his head around, throwing his eyes wide and wild. “I couldn’t - Merlin, I was scared. I was so scared, and I didn’t say no to my father when it mattered, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was wrong. I knew it then, and I know it now, and I’ve carried that around with me for years. I was wrong and your people suffered so much for it, and I’m sorry.”

And there it is - the honest and bare way that Arthur says it. Stripped of pomp and pride; of excuses and reasoning. It cuts the legs out from under Merlin’s anger and he stumbles inside himself, fighting against years of holding a secret, sacred hatred that he had ignored but never fully put away.

Arthur, maybe seeing how Merlin starts to calm and settle, makes a move towards him. His arm shakes as it does only after a tournament long fought or a battle hard won; his composure is shattered under the weight of so many years of guilt and secretly kept repentance. But now, when Merlin tries to ease off on the flood of power that washes down his spine in response to the approach of a Camelot knight, he finds he cannot; that he can no longer say, this is Camelot, Arthur is the King, and that means everything will be fine, to himself and believe it.

“Stop!” Merlin cries, the word echoing through the damp hollow, Merlin for once not trying to stifle the word with his will and his bitten fist.

Thunder sparks out from his fingertips, snaps out in a rush of frigid power. Between himself and Arthur, Merlin raises up a shield of raw energy, crackling up magic too bright to bear seeing. Arthur flinches and covers his eyes - his eyes that widen despite the pain of seeing, because this is it, there’s no going back now.

Arthur startles, hand reaching for his sword, instinct born of his endless training pulling his muscles tight and his face into a hard line.

“You’re a sorcerer? All this time, you’ve had magic!”

(The sound of drawn sword shears bright through the grove, a sound echoed here in memory and coupled tight in Merlin’s mind with screaming; with the slick squelch of split flesh.)

“You keep away from me,” Merlin screams, ten years young and many thousands of eons old. “You stay back and don’t touch me.”

Black spots thicken over Merlin’s eyes, sound pales from his ears and a fuzzy grey fills them in its place, and only through the support of his magic does he stay standing. It’s been so many years since he had sat in this grove and watched Camelot’s prince freeze and cry (unflinching, unaware) as hot blood spattered from a knight’s blade and stained his wheat-thatch hair. So many years and he still knows what the exact pitch of Ifan’s voice had been in his dying.

Fever rushes through Merlin and overtakes him swiftly, shuttering the flow of magic. It pops in his ears as it fades from him. His arms shake and fall to his sides.

The forest leans over him, shadows falling once more between the trees, damp musk welling up from the ground. The forest leans over him, and he is alone.

Merlin sits down, listens to the silence, and tries to sleep but can’t. Lies down and lets the dark of night devour him, eyes open and unseeing.

8.

This is the day he remembers. That he will always remember. The day that finds him in the dark and worries away at his sanity even under the clear light of morning.

The sun will rise slowly. It is yet dark, but the stars have started hiding in the colouring sky, and soon the sun will rise and cover even the moon away. That is Emrys’s favourite part of the day - watching the dawn’s blush fade as the sun creeps higher and higher. So he smiles, happy to be up and tripping through the forest while the sky is yet dark, dawn barely a weak blue threat along the edge of the horizon.

He’s hungry. It is morning, and he is hungry, is this little boy who tumbles between the trees. His stomach clenches in on itself and threatens to yowl and break the silence of the forest he so adores, so please, hush, hush, soon there will be fish. And Iowerth said yesterday that this morning she plans to milk Greta, so if he hurries, there will be fish fried up and served with cream, and that, surely, is worth the wait for breaking his fast.

Moss - deep enough to swallow his ankles, and wet underneath besides - cushions his bare feet as they punch through a thoroughly rotten tree trunk and pull away covered in soft wood fibres. Clouds above his head scrape the sky away and shimmer where they hang, for the sun is rising.

Tripping along, traipsing fleet through the forest and between the trees, a bundle of fish hanging from the clench of his fist, and he smiles. He is smiling still as he round over the swell that covers the hollow of their grove and -

- his heart stops when he hears the screaming.

(The cracking of bone and the shearing screams of terror snaps his through him, a thunderclap of horror that isn’t real, that belongs in his dreams, and it is full day now, sun so high that he isn’t dreaming, this isn’t that dream again, and he never was a prophet -

they promised him, they said you, Emrys, will never dream True

- so this can’t be happening. He doesn’t dream True, he never has, and so this is not a thing that will ever happen to him.)

The bundle of fish in his hand falls, bouncing slightly on the springy moss.

That’s gone dirty, now; best make sure the skin gets washed before the trout are scaled and gutted and fried, else the crunch of dirt will ruin the smoothness of the cream gravy.

Emrys clenches his fist tight in want of the knotted rope, nails sharp against the tender give of his palm and -

flinches

- stutters into a run, pulls his legs up and leans forward and holds his arm out, out, out, ready to wield any power great or terrible, just to make that screaming stop.

He runs, he sprints and tries to hold back the strangled fear in his throat, but can’t. It breaks loose from him, a sickly whine broken up by the thumping of his feet on the ground, the jolt that shakes him and breaks him wholly.

And then, just then, he crests the last hill sees -

- chaos and nightmare, a nest of red-wrapped vipers that laugh and grunt, panting through the red mist hanging over the writhing pile of - of.

Light crackles with a cruel tint in his palm, gathers along his fist, and he will break them. He will rend their flesh and bring about their slow destruction, and he will laugh because of the rightness of his fury.

Emrys takes a step, and then two - and then he’s falling, curling in on the clench and twist of his stomach, and screaming in total silence.

Hush, child, and quiet and calm and hush, says a panoply of age and youth. It is not our time, so hush and be still.

In the grove, a tall knight with a hand-and-a-half sword twists around his flapping cloak (the wind rising high and roaring fast) and laughs, gutting Iowerth so deep her falling corpse bends too far back and her spine snaps and she falls, viscera pouring through the split of her body, and Emrys stares and stares and -

- breaks, under the shadow of an unbroken oak.

Little boy, a lost little boy trembling against an old oak, trapped in his own power, listening to the whisper of Albion (who cradles him, who catches him tight in comforting winds and presses warmth into him from the yellow sun) as she tells him rest, be at peace, I am here, I will always be here; rest and I will hold you close till the new dawning day, when they will be gone, these chattel of the Usurper. I will hold you, child; sleep.

The little druid boy - born under the name Merlin to Hunith, a daughter of the human world, but raised as Emrys, a child of the earth - trembles and does not rest. He watches the riders strip the camp of talismans (weak without the support of life, trying to leach magic from the people who are no longer there, so useless to take, their power comes from life and these knights ask them to glut on death) and kick bodies, still struggling, into a rough pile.

I can heal them, LET ME HEAL THEM, but Albion grips him tight and wraps him close, because you cannot, little one; you cannot.

Their spirits mist up from their bodies and snap gnashing teeth at the soldiers, but they do not notice. They would not notice, yet - anger strong enough to warp ghosts into the weft of the physical world must steep, first. Sometimes for years.

Merlin (his name as a child, before he came to know Destiny and Duty; his name that he heard in a once upon a time from his mother’s mouth, as she tugged him from the nightmares that he feared were True) waits in the slow seep of blood and trembles, hidden and alone. And before him, he sees another who waits - a boy golden and too small for the large wrap of his cloak, silent and horrified, sitting upon a steady horse and frozen with fear just as Merlin is.

Dimly, Merlin thinks, and he is both my destiny and duty, and he is just as scared as I. And maybe that truth will always be; maybe that boy upon that awkwardly large horse and wrapped in a cloak too big for the small stretch of his shoulders will always be a boy afraid. Maybe that’s the truth, even though the boy upon that horse is supposed to have all the courage of a commander - that he’s still a boy afraid of his father and his own failure. Maybe that’s the entire point of this Destiny thrust on Merlin - to teach him how insubstantial his fear is, in light of his foretold brilliance.

Merlin listens to the knights of Camelot release their victory cry and tell their crass jokes coupled with obscene gestures. He watches them ride the high of their bloodlust and there is nothing for him to do but wait for them to remount and slowly amble away, the boy crowned with the gold of his hair listing off beside them.

The smell of death limns the air, and all is red; all has gone to red.

9.

And in the darkness, he shakes himself to. Merlin tosses on his bed of moss, sweaty and aching from the dull thump of unfettered magic in his veins, used and sore with him. The sky pales slowly above him, but in the height of summer, that still makes it an unbearably early hour. Early enough that he has a most welcome reason to stay here and try to sleep for maybe an hour or two, and so he turns over, still scared of falling into the dream world where he never stops his running and yet even more scared of consigning himself to wakefulness, where Arthur is king and murderer both.

He waits (not thinking, not thinking at all of anything) until the sun spreads its rosy blush atop the clouds before pulling himself to his feet. The walk back to Camelot is long, and quiet in its loneliness.

(And if he can hear the soft swishing of grasses behind him, the careful tread of a hunter tracking him all the way back to Camelot, Merlin says nothing. He hurts in his chest, and his throat, and - most absurdly - his right hand, but there’s nothing left in him to anger. So he walks, and he listens to someone else walking just behind him and out of sight, and he aches with an exhaustion that strips the feeling from his bones.)

10.

Arthur sits down on the curling tower stairs three steps above Merlin and stretches out his legs in silence. They sit and breathe and wait, until Arthur’s voice splits the silence as gently as a selkie slipping beneath the water’s surface.

“Thought I might find you here.”

Merlin snorts. “No one ever comes up to the top of the South Tower. Ever. Not since Sarah started spreading those rumours about the ghost of the Duke of Anglesea.

“Exactly. She made quite a romance out of this tower. I knew that would appeal to your girlish sentimentality. And here you are.”

Arthur sways towards Merlin and half raises his loosely clenched fist as if to punch Merlin in the shoulder, but stops himself; grimaces and resettles, frowning at thoughts only he is privy to. Though Merlin could probably hazard a safe guess at them.

“I came up here because I wanted to be alone, you dollophead.” The friendly insult sounds forced, and it is, pushed out between Merlin’s unwilling lips.

Drust crumbles out from the mortar worried between Merlin’s fingers, plumes up and flakes grey atop the fine weave of Arthur’s breeches. Merlin swallows against the dryness in his throat and tries to ignore the haze of childish fear and ancient anger that roils in his gut, and the soppy warmth he still cannot stop himself from feeling, melting low in him and sneaking up his throat to flush his cheeks, at Arthur’s closeness in this place of isolation.

“So,” Arthur says. “Sorcerer.”

“So,” Merlin mocks, and nothing close to gentle. “Murderer.”

Arthur recoils, pulling the arm closest to Merlin tight to his own chest, strapping it across himself and hunching in over his stomach, before remembering his poise. He straightens, and breathes deeply - not coughing, though the sun shines muted through the haze of dust and grit in the air - and settles his face, placid and serene. Merlin can’t help but feel like he’s ruining something here.

“I deserve that, I suppose,” Arthur says, eyes turned away and squinting through the archer’s slit at the bursting bloom of the sun setting over Camelot’s battlements.

“No,” Merlin says. He feels small, and unbearably young. “I don’t think you really do.” Wind sneaks in through the archer’s slit and wraps cold fingers around Merlin’s skin. “But I want you to. It would be more simple, if I thought you did.”

Arthur hums, and then shivers. Tucks his hands under his arms and crosses one leg over the other.

“I heard you, following me on the road back to Camelot.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Merlin. If I followed you, there’s no way you would’ve known about it.”

Merlin ignores the glib tone of Arthur’s voice and presses on. “Did you stay there, in the grove?”

For a moment, he doesn’t think Arthur will answer. But he does, in a voice crackling with tension.

“There’s all manner of foul creatures in the Darkling Woods. Your luck, you could’ve attracted them all and gotten eaten before the night was up. And besides. I couldn’t very well leave a... a Druid loose in the forest, wandering around. Of course I stayed.”

“You stayed to guard a sorcerer, then.”

“No, Merlin.” Arthur turns to him, resting his elbow on the step above him and looking down at Merlin with his head gently tilted. “I stayed to look after a friend.”

“Even though...”

“Especially because of that. You know, you can’t hold your magic any better than you can hold your liquor. And I’ve seen you stumbling about the Great Hall after sneaking a leftover, half empty wine goblet from the side table during a feast. Tripped over your own two feet and dropped a full bowl of salt, you did. I shan’t be so lenient when I catch you next time.”

“Oi, you had me pilloried in the stocks for three hours the next day!” Merlin protests despite the heaviness in his gut.

“Exactly.” A small, wistful smile flickers across Arthur’s face. “Next time, you won’t be so lucky.”

“Arthur...” Merlin pauses, fighting hard to tell Arthur what he’d been hiding for so long. “I’m a Druid, Arthur. I have magic.”

“I know. And Merlin, when I was stupid and cowardly and young, I led a group of Camelot knights to your camp and did nothing to stop their slaughter. I’m so sorry for that.”

“I know you are,” Merlin says. “Saw you in that grove, crying and everything. Tears running down your cheeks.” Merlin stops at the desperate look on Arthur’s face. “Thank you, Arthur. Ifan wasn’t the only one who needed to find rest in that grove.”

The South Tower stretches very high over the castle, and the quiet of its solitude shrouds it tightly. They are alone, listening to the whistling of the wind through the small cracks of disrepair.

“What happened to you, after?”

“I went to my mother’s, in Ealdor. We’d been headed there, the camp. For Beltane. And I just kept going, I suppose.” Merlin shakes his head and twists his hands in his lap; curls his crossed legs tight up to his chest and rests his chin on his knee. His head wobbles up and down as he talks, but it feels better, anyway. “I can’t really remember anything about getting there, really. Don’t remember how long it took. I just know that when I did get there, I was still red with blood and purple with bruises and thin enough that my mother was able to carry me from the outlying road to our hut. And you’ve seen my mother. Smaller than a ten summers’ child.” Merlin looks up at Arthur and tries for some sort of probably inappropriate levity.

It doesn’t quite work, but Arthur quirks up his mouth at the effort.

“How in the seven hells did you get to Ealdor on your own?” Arthur rasps out, words strangled in the thickness of his throat.

“I think maybe Albion helped me. When I went to stay with the Druids, she started talking to me. Part of the whole ‘Emrys’ deal, I suppose. Magic running like blood in your veins, bending dragons to heed your most idle whims. Talking to the earth even when you’d rather just be left alone in your head.”

Arthur shifts the more Merlin talks, twisting away from him before stopping himself, face steeling over, and turning back.

“‘Emrys’ deal?” he asks tightly.

“Oh, yes,” Merlin says, and he doesn’t even sound bitter anymore. Soft, maybe, and almost sad, but not bitter. The cancer of his anger receding at last. “We have a destiny, you know. Heard it from Albion herself. I’m the voice of Albion, Arthur, and you are our Once and Future King.”

“This Albion, the thing I’m destined to create.” And though Merlin may not have sounded bitter, Arthur does. Bitter and scared.

“Create? Nah, nothing half so grand. Albion has been here for longer than you can imagine, Arthur. She’s just been waiting for you to make her whole.”

If Merlin had thought that would make Arthur feel any better at all, he would have been mistaken. If anything, it brings the fear on Arthur’s face into sharp focus, smoothing away the crinkling around his eyes and casting his face with the innocence of a boy alone and scared.

It makes Merlin afraid as well, so he skitters on.

“So. There I was again, living in Ealdor for the first time in years. Mother told everyone who asked that the apprenticeship I’d been sent away for had failed; that my master and our caravan had been attacked and all but me were killed.” Merlin coughs, suddenly feeling awkward under Arthur’s concentrated focus. He shifts, leaning his head back against the stonework and locking his hands around his knees. “The story worked enough. Some had suspicions, but more were overcome with pity that it didn’t matter. Not for years. Not until I slipped up and almost squashed Old Man Simmons with that damn tree.

“By then I was thinking of leaving, anyway. To Camelot.” Merlin rolls his head against the tower wall and stares straight into Arthur’s eyes. “To you. Or, to the Prince of Camelot, I should say. That Destiny lark.”

“Yes,” Arthur says, looking almost dazed and soft in a way that makes Merlin’s stomach curl loose and warm. “That whole lark.” Abruptly, Arthur sits up straight, swinging his feet around and planting them on the step below Merlin.

“Woah, hey!” Merlin blusters, squirming underneath Arthur’s legs and back up against the wall. “Give a guy a warning, would you.”

“Show me,” Arthur says.

“Umm,” Merlin replies.

“You’re a Druid, yeah? Or close enough. So you should have one of those... you know.” Arthur points to a bare patch of his own skin, circling his finger over the stretched curve of his throat “So. Show me.”

Merlin can feel his eyebrows pulling together and twisting into a confused frown before understanding strikes him ever-so-slightly dumb.

“Uhhh!” he objects.

Arthur sighs impatiently. “Come on, I haven’t really got a look at any tribal tattoos up close. Give us a look, go on.”

Merlin fidgets where he sits, the press of almost-warm stone sore against his bones, legs fuzzy from being held for so long in an awkward contortion.

“You’ll never stop being an annoying, entitled prat, will you, sire,” he says.

At Arthur’s insistent tilt of his eyebrows, Merlin sighs theatrically and reaches up to pluck at the knot of his neckerchief until it’s loose enough to draw the loop up over his head and off. The faded red fabric bleeds down the stairs when Merlin drops it. Chill air draws gooseflesh up on the skin of his collarbone. He hesitates, somehow shy of a sudden, before shoving at Arthur’s legs until they bracket along Merlin’s side and pulling the rough fabric of his tunic over his shoulder.

Merlin had never had the money or the opportunity to buy (or abscond with) any bright, polished metals, let alone the two he would need in order to see the stark relief of his tattoo against the pale skin of his shoulderblade, so he’s not quite sure what it looks like. He’d been quite young when the camp priest had drawn it up on him, near as soon as his mother had given up his care to Iowerth, but he’d often asked for sketched impressions of his marking from those with talent in their fingers.

Ifan had drawn him his favourite copy, but this is even better than that rough charcoal sketch drawn upon a hearth stone - this, Arthur’s finger a shock against him, shaky at first, and then more firm, as Arthur traces the weaving wrap of inter-knotted lines that circle the bold sprawl of the triskelion.

When Merlin shivers, Arthur stops tracing with his cold fingertips and presses his palm flat over the design, thumb absently stroking over the edging of the ink.

“Cold up here,” Merlin says. His teeth clack together in punctuation.

“If you weren’t such a girl’s blouse, you’d have brought a cloak up here to sulk in,” Arthur replies. “Come here.” He pulls up at Merlin’s arm until he scoots up to the step just below Arthur. The stone is cold under him again, but already Arthur is leaning back against tower wall, stretching his legs out along his step again, and pulling Merlin sideways until his back is firm against Arthur’s front, wrapping arms warm like dragon breath across Merlin’s chest.

“It’ll be full dark, soon,” Arthur says.

“But the moon’s been so bright, the past few nights,” Merlin says.

The sunset throws slanting beams in orange brilliance over the stonework. Merlin squints at the brightness, and then gives up, settling his eyes closed and relaxing into Arthur’s hold.

They rest there like that long after nightfall. Arthur’s arms slack around Merlin as the moon starts its long descent, but that’s okay - Merlin knows now what to do. He shifts slightly back, presses himself flush against Arthur’s chest and grabs Arthur tight by his arms.

They sit like that, holding each other together, until the new day dawns bright across the clear sky.

--.