World Comes Tumbling (1/3)
Title: World Comes Tumbling
Wordcount: ~26,000
Summary: Arthur Pendragon is working with a group of sorcerers that plan to take his father's company apart, but when a rescue attempt goes wrong and he's forced to go into hiding, he goes to a safehouse run by Merlin, the sorcerer who started his defection in the first place.
Warnings: For the plot: minor character death, references to imprisonment and unethical experimentation on humans, aftermath of both. For the sex: barebacking, sex magic (fully consensual). As always, if I missed a warning, I apologize and please let me know.
A/N: This is set in the same universe as Melt You Down, two years later, but this does stand alone and you don't have to read that. The title is from Muse's song "Resistance." Other than that, I have written this whole thing in a bit less than two weeks and I am just going to go collapse now.
Disclaimer: I do not own Merlin.
“You aren’t going to fuck this up.”
Arthur refuses to jump even though it’s late and he thought he was alone in the office. Instead, he takes a moment to look up from his screen to catch sight of Morgana, still dressed for work, leaning against his door. “Is that meant to be reassurance or a threat? No, wait, you must have dreamed it. Always good to have prophecy on my side.”
“I don’t need to use my talents to know this, Arthur.” He meets her eyes, a bit startled that she’s showing any faith in him at all. Most days Morgana rails against him as hard as she does against his father. “I knew you would be all right two years ago. It’s just taken a while for the others to come round, that’s all. Tonight’s the last hoop you have to jump through, I promise.”
“This is the first I’ve heard of it. You seemed quite skeptical of me at first.”
Morgana steps in and sits down at his extra chair. “Skeptical of how far along you were, maybe. Never of whether you’d get it in the end, though.”
“And what could I have possibly done to earn such faith?” He musters all the sarcasm he can and leans back in his chair. He knows when it was--of course he does, down to the exact date, maybe even the hour--but he isn’t sure exactly what impressed Morgana. Was it that he figured out she was the silent figure assisting the others? Was it that he’d waited before pulling an alarm far from where he knew the invaders were going? They’ve never really talked about it, beyond him saying he wants to help and her telling him to prove it.
“The first question you asked me that morning was whether Merlin and Freya were safe.” She smiles when he just blinks at her, a cat-that-got-the-cream smirk that puts him back on safer ground. “You could have shouted at me, since you recognized me, you could have told your father or the police, but the first words out of your mouth were asking after them.”
After Merlin, really, but he won’t say that to Morgana. She doesn’t know that the morning after a sleepless night of telling lies to security guards Arthur had rushed out to buy a paper for the answers the police wouldn’t give him, one of the pro-magic papers his father wouldn’t even use to burn, or how he sat in a coffee shop with his shoulders hunched to hide his face and saw a picture of Merlin with his arms wrapped around a girl, smiling and silly and not the dangerous creature with changeable eyes and a rough voice he’d held against his chest. The girl was his sister, the paper had explained, and he’d skimmed over phrases--”most powerful mage in Albion,” and “police found his home empty”--and wondered for the first time what was in the basement labs he’d never got to see. Merlin was always the important part. “So what do I have to do tonight? Presumably you’re here to tell me, and not working late. You aren’t wearing rescue clothes.”
“It’s too soon after Mordred. Uther thought the children’s ward was safe, so he’s raised security again.” Her mouth curls around the words “children’s ward” in a way that makes him sick, makes him think of hospitals, where things are supposed to be made better. “No, I’m here to give you a properly scrambled radio. We don’t trust mobiles,” she adds when he makes a face, and produces a radio from seemingly nowhere to hand to him. He takes it automatically. “You’ve talked to everyone you need to, but the safehouse staff needs to trust you as well. Just talk to them, and that’s all you need. On the radios we use codenames. You’ll be talking to the Dragon, he takes care of most of the communication the safehouse does--”
“I feel as if I’m in a spy film.”
“And he’ll be calling you Wart.”
Morgana smiles serenely and Arthur glares at her. “You swore never to tell anyone about that.”
“And I didn’t. I just used it as your pseudonym, that’s all. You can thank me later. He’ll be talking to you quite soon, so I’ll duck out. Text me whether it went well or not, after.” She stands to leave, then furrows her brow. “Just … don’t say anything stupid, Arthur.”
“I think I’ve been trained out of that in the last two years, don’t you?”
Her raised eyebrow means that’s far too easy an opening for her to take. “Think before you speak,” she says instead of insulting him, and ducks out.
Arthur is left in his dark office, knowing that he should probably get away from his father’s building before he answers a call from sorcerers trying to get the “volunteer test subjects” away from Pendragon Corp and shut down the company, but unwilling to go out on the street as well. Eventually he decides to trust the scrambled signal to keep the conversation from showing up on security footage and waits for the signal.
It takes fifteen minutes before the radio lets out a high-pitched beep, and Arthur immediately starts pressing buttons to make it stop. “Is that the Dragon?” he asks when he gets to slightly staticky silence, feeling foolish.
“Oh, fuck, fuck, how did you get this radio?”
And suddenly it’s two years ago and there’s a voice whispering in his ear and a warm pulse under his hand, and Arthur gapes in silence before realizing that his communication is probably about to get cut off and send the whole organization into a panic. “No, hold on, wait, please, this is Wart. I’m Wart. I’m … I thought they would have warned you. M--Fay, I thought Fay would have told you.”
“But it’s you,” Merlin says, sounding a little lost. Arthur can sympathize. He’d never expected to hear another thing about Merlin, except in his wildest dreams, because anyone smart would be out of the country and in hiding. “It can’t be you.”
“It shouldn’t be you either,” says Arthur for the lack of anything better. “I thought you would be across the world. They’re still looking for you, it can’t be safe.”
“A safe house is the safest place to be. And I can protect myself.” Arthur remembers dust falling out of his gun, gold in Merlin’s eyes; his worry is useless, of course, but that doesn’t mean he can stop. “Why are you helping us, Wart?”
Morgause asked it in a tone of deep disinterest, like his answer didn’t matter. Gilli was belligerent. Alice was gentle but firm. None of them sounded like this, confused and helpless and soft, and if Arthur didn’t know better he would think Merlin is someone who needs protecting. “After that night,” he starts, and stops, because he doesn’t quite know how to say this the right way. “You told me to figure out what was going on,” he tries instead. “The next morning, after I realized that I knew who Fay was, I asked her, and she showed me. I’d thought--I’d been told, for so long--”
“That they were volunteers,” Merlin supplies. “That they wanted to be rid of their magic and that they would let Pendragon Corp do anything and everything to take it from them.”
“But of course it wasn’t true. I shouldn’t have believed someone who hates magic this much, but he sent me to schools where I wouldn’t meet the gifted and it never occurred to me to ask.” Arthur keeps his voice as even as he can. He still wakes from dreams sweaty and nauseous, remembering the labs Morgana had walked him through after hours while she whispered with those who still had wits enough to listen. “She showed me what they do, and it’s … I can’t believe what he’s done, in the name of …”
In the name of his mother, mostly, killed by magic mere days after his birth, experiments with magical fertility treatments gone wrong. “I know this,” whispers Merlin. “Why did you decide to change it?”
“Because anyone with any human decency would,” he snaps. “Nobody deserves to be driven mad like that.”
“I think that’s the right answer.”
Arthur blinks at the radio. “Why?”
“You wouldn’t hurt us. Not any longer.” He remembers his gun at Merlin’s head and feels a hot rush of shame. “I’ll contact headquarters in the morning. You’re safe as far as I’m concerned.”
Before Arthur can say anything else, ask any questions, he’s listening to the crackle of static and nothing else.
*
Merlin bends over the second he flips off the radio and presses his forehead to his knees, trying to get a proper breath.
It could be seconds or it could be minutes before Freya comes in. “Merlin? Merlin, are you all right?”
“Is Mordred in bed?”
She sits down across the table from him and he manages to sit up, still feeling like someone punched him in the gut. Arthur, Arthur Pendragon, on his radio saying he wants to help. He’s half-expecting to wake up any second because it can’t be real. Surely someone would have told him before. “He’s reading. He does insist on reading all those violent books, and he’s still not talking much. I worry about him.”
“He’s only been here a few weeks, and on top of having been there his parents gave him to Pendragon. It will take a while.”
She looks at the radio. “Who was it? Bad news? You’re upset.”
“I just had a chat with the latest member to join the underground, and he’s safe. Wart, we’re supposed to call him.” That much Freya needs to know. The next part he probably shouldn’t say, but this is the safehouse. He’s drenched it in so much magic that phones don’t work, surveillance devices are useless, even magical eavesdropping, and he needs to say it to someone. “He’s Arthur Pendragon.”
Freya lets there be silence for a minute instead of asking if he’s sure, or if that was why he was upset, or one of a hundred other possible questions. “You trust him,” she says at last, no judgment in her tone.
That’s the important question, for them. Everyone in the underground is interrogated under truthspell before they get told anything big, but nobody joins unless they’re a hopeless idealist or a spy, and nobody thinks they’ll crack under bribes or torture or any of the other pressures Uther Pendragon can put on them. Those are the important things to know, and no spell can reveal that. Arthur Pendragon, though, won’t betray them. Merlin knows that with overwhelming and frightening certainty. “Fuck, I do. I shouldn’t. He held a gun to my head.”
He never told her the full story of that night, of telling Arthur to pull the trigger and filling him with magic and the look on his face when Merlin told him to wait. She knows enough, though, and she knows him. “He didn’t pull the alarm, though,” she says. “You’ve never sounded as if you dislike him, all the times we’ve talked about that night.”
“It’s not a matter of like or dislike. It’s that he’s Uther Pendragon’s son and there’s no way this won’t all end badly.”
“Then why did you give him the okay?”
Because he sounded like he was going to vomit at the thought of what went on in his facilities. Because when he said “human decency” he sounded like he meant it. Because two years ago, he held Merlin like he’d forgotten he was holding a gun as well. “I don’t know. I just trust him.”
“You’re shouting,” says Mordred in a high, flat voice from the door to the kitchen. Merlin starts; not many people can creep up on him, and he knows he and Freya were keeping their voices down. “In my head, you’re shouting.”
Merlin’s never been a mind-reader. That and seeing the future are the only two things he can’t do, when he’s being honest, so he isn’t quite sure what to do with Mordred’s wide, unblinking stare. Freya just sits there and lets out the shuddering breath that he recognizes from every time he’s around a mind-reader, while every secret she doesn’t want told rushes across her conscious mind. “We’re sorry, Mordred. Didn’t anyone train you to turn it off when you want to sleep or be private?” he says.
“I used to know how to turn it off, but I can’t anymore. They did something.”
They hear all kinds of stories, at the safehouse. The rescuers don’t usually talk much while they’re breaking people out, so Merlin and Freya are the first friendly faces some of these people have seen in years. Still, though, he doesn’t think he’s heard anything worse than a little boy telling him that he can’t get other people out of his head because of something Pendragon Corp did to him. “I can’t believe what he’s done,” Arthur said on the radio. Merlin is inclined to agree.
Freya stands and goes to Mordred, puts her arms around him. He doesn’t really react, but she’s whispering soothing things and probably thinking them as hard as she can as well, and hopefully that will help. Merlin’s well out of his depth with Mordred, and Freya is too, but they have to try their best until they find a family to take him in, one that can deal with a very powerful child. “I can ward your room,” he offers when Freya seems to run out of things to say. “Soak it in magic until you can’t hear anything outside it, and that way if you need to sleep or just want to be alone you can. And we’ll try to train your control back.”
“Unless whatever they did is permanent,” says Mordred, probably so he doesn’t have to worry about them thinking it. Merlin doesn’t think he could hate Uther Pendragon more than he does at this moment.
“We’ll fix it. We’ll make it better.”
“Could you ward my room?”
Freya steps aside, looking worn out and sad, and he squeezes her hand as he passes her. Hopefully she won’t disappear to her room while he’s helping Mordred. Mordred walks ahead of him down the hallway, and Merlin follows him into his room, which is still mostly bare of possessions, even though they’ve offered to get him anything he needs. “Let me know when you can’t hear Freya anymore, okay?” says Merlin when they get inside and shut the door.
Mordred just sits down on the bed, watching with wide eyes and leaving Merlin to wonder if he’s ever actually seen the kid blink. And then to apologize in his head because of course Mordred heard that. That done, he starts filling the room with magic, imagining runes for silence and protection blazing on the walls, and the world goes gold and a little too bright like it always does when he does big magic. “That’s enough,” says Mordred after nearly ten minutes, and Merlin lets go of the magic and has to brace himself against the wall while the world spins. It’s almost vibrating against his hand, a warm purr. Hopefully that will fade, or it will be distracting.
“We’ll make you a proximity alarm in the morning so you can still hear if anyone’s coming,” Merlin promises. “And we’ll work out a training schedule to get your shields back up, too. Do you think you’ll be able to sleep now?”
“I’ve got a book to read. Thank you.”
Merlin has no idea how a child that age can give such a clear dismissal, but he doesn’t question it. Instead, he waves an awkward goodnight and goes back to the kitchen, where Freya seems to be making tea. “Are you okay?” he asks.
“We aren’t set up to train a child, or even take care of one for long. Neither of us had training for mind-reading.”
“We’ll find him a family, Frey.” He boils the water with a look, just for something to do, even though she says it makes the tea taste different. “Just now we have to find him parents willing to deal with more than we’d thought before. I know what we can handle. Maybe the next person to come through will have the right skills to help. We’re bound to start getting more people with Wart’s access codes and not just Fay’s for getting into the wards.”
“And what will Pendragon’s reaction be when more and more people start escaping? He’ll change the security, or move the people.”
Freya’s twisting her hands, and Merlin grabs her wrist just to feel the pulse and remind them both that she’s safe. “We can’t fix it all at once. Morgause has told me that enough times. But they haven’t managed to pass a discrimination law since we broke you out, and we’re starting to get the children out. It will get better, yeah? We’ve got to believe that.”
*
In his first month working with Morgana and the other sorcerers, Arthur helps three people who came under his father’s scrutiny out of the city before they end up in one of his facilities and helps a rescue team with what they apparently call an “Emrys Decoy,” pulling an alarm for a supposed gas leak on the other side of the facility from whatever sorcerer they’re saving. He never finds out who it was he helped.
He knows it’s good work, and he’s not happier, precisely, but certainly more satisfied than he’s been with himself in two years. Still, Arthur feels as if everyone else is keeping him away from the sorcerers in case he decides to betray them after all. When he asks Morgana, she scoffs and says it’s because he doesn’t have enough experience yet, but he still wonders.
The first time he helps with a rescue, pressed against the wall of an alley with three other people waiting for a police car to drive by, he hears Merlin’s voice crackle across the radio and almost lunges to rip it out of Gilli’s hands. It’s just a routine check-in, Merlin letting them know that the room at the safehouse is ready even though the people from the city usually stay there less than a week, but his nervousness fades immediately and he makes a point of not asking himself why.
His father calls Arthur to his office six weeks after Merlin approves him, probably noticing that his son has been avoiding him more than usual. “You’ve seemed bored with your work lately, Arthur, and I’ve decided it’s time to give you more responsibility.”
“What do you mean, father?”
Uther Pendragon hasn’t made himself this powerful and successful by being a fool, no matter how often Morgana and Morgause call him one. Blind, yes, unyielding, of course, but not a fool. He knows Arthur’s an idealist, and he won’t show him the worst yet. He’ll work up to that. “I know that I’ve kept you from the R&D side of things since your degree was in Business Law and not the sciences, but you’ll have to know how everything works when you take the company over for me.”
“So you want me to visit the labs, or the dormitories?” Arthur keeps his voice as casual as he can manage.
“Eventually, but not yet. I do have something in mind for you, though it won’t have you working with the anti-sorcery work directly, at least not yet. I need someone to figure out where the hole in our security is and keep these ridiculous rescue groups from getting through. They’re giving us a bad name.”
Arthur nods instead of saying anything that he wishes he could. The hardest part about joining Morgana’s underground movement has been pretending that nothing has changed and that he still believes magic is evil (though he hasn’t even really had time to reconsider his stance on magic--he just knows that what his father does to sorcerers is worse than anything he’s heard of any of them doing outside of fairy tales). “I’ll audit security, see what kind of corners they’re cutting, and if they aren’t cutting any, I’ll see how the sorcerers are getting through spell-proofed doors.” Somehow without bringing Morgana’s codes into it.
His father looks pleased. Two years ago Arthur would have done anything for that proud almost-smile and the clap on his shoulder that comes next. “I’m sure you’ll do the job admirably, Arthur. I’ll get you the necessary security codes so you can see everything. Ask Morgana to give you to tour if you find yourself needing to go to the labs.”
“Thank you, Father.”
When he’s almost out of the office, his father calls him back. “Don’t tell too many people that you’re helping me with this, Arthur. I’m sure you can guess why.”
“Of course.”
The second Arthur’s out of the office that night, he calls Morgana on the cheap mobile he bought for underground calls and tells her everything his father told him. “It’s good that you’re still fooling him this well, and still better that you’ll have access codes that get you to more places without going in the records. You’ll be much more use in rescues, and there’s a matter I want to discuss with you soon about rescues that will take both of our codes and a lot of work. Not over the phone, though.”
“We’ll meet up and go for a drive this weekend, get out of the city. You can tell me then.” He pauses. “How do you go into those labs every day without going mad?”
“I just remind myself that we’ll get them out of there. It’s good that your father is trusting you more, even if it means you have to be on both sides at once. It means he’s going to retire someday, and the second he’s out of the company we’re going to take it apart brick by brick. Keep that in mind.” She sighs. “And now I’ve got to get dressed, he set me up on a blind date with yet another rich man without a single brain in his head. Take care, Wart.”
Before he can object to her using his childhood nickname outside the scrambled radio conferences when he’s forced to answer to it, Morgana hangs up her phone, leaving Arthur to spend another night fidgeting around his flat, wishing he was still interested in spending time with his uni and footie mates, the next generation of his father’s cronies. He still speaks with Leon, sometimes, but Leon’s far up the ranks in their legal department and Arthur doesn’t trust himself to lie to him. Instead of calling anyone, he turns on the telly and watches pundit after pundit on the news say that sorcerers should be forced to register with the government, something they’ve been saying in increasingly desperate tones for years now. He’s at least pleased that his father hasn’t managed that yet.
It’s a long couple of days before Saturday, when Arthur picks up Morgana (carrying what looks like a designer picnic basket) and drives them out of the city, far from anyone who would want to listen in on their conversations.
“What is it you wanted to tell me?” he asks when they’ve found a patch of mostly-dry ground in the sun to sit on and she’s staring at him over her cucumber sandwich.
“When we’ve been doing the rescues, we’ve of course been using the plans filed with security to see where everything is located and what sort of defenses we’ll have to get through.” Arthur nods; he knew that long before he was made a full member of the group. “The child we rescued, almost two months ago now, he’s a mind-reader. He said before we passed him on to Merlin that he heard people screaming from below him.”
“There’s no basement under the children’s ward,” Arthur says automatically, and realizes that he’s probably just proved whatever point Morgana is about to make.
“Morgause took some other mind-readers to the facility last weekend and had them scan for thoughts, with as much power as they could. There’s a hidden basement under the children’s ward. We could only detect four people down there, and we don’t know who they are yet, but that’s our next goal. Uther doesn’t want anyone to know about whoever’s down there and we want to take him down, so we’ve got to get them out.”
“It will have to be all of them at once or we’ll only get one,” says Arthur, half a week’s worth of looking through security files coming to mind. “If Father cares about them that much, enough to hide them on the building plans, then he’ll almost certainly move them to an even worse location the moment he’s got a hint that we can get in to them, or even kill them, unless they’re more valuable than the others. It isn’t like the others, where he can write it off as a night’s incompetence, or sorcerers being wily.”
Morgana leans back on the blanket, looking for all the world like they’re just having a friendly picnic. “Our first order of business will be to figure out who they are and why they’re down there. Then we’ll figure out how to get them out. It will be easier with both of our security codes, but it still might take a while.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
“Morgause said we shouldn’t. She’s fine with having you help on the rescues but she’s worried on letting you in on the bigger things.” Morgana smirks, like they’re teenagers again and she’s got one over on him. “Merlin and I convinced her otherwise. He asked after you, you know.”
Arthur bites his sandwich instead of answering and pretends it’s the sun making his face pink.
*
“I’m going to town,” Merlin calls up the stairs one morning. “Gwaine says our latest supplies have come in down at the shop and I want to get them as soon as I can.”
Mordred appears in his doorway down the hall as Freya calls an acknowledgment from upstairs. “Gummi worms,” he says in that eerily solemn way he has. “For rewards when I manage to put shields up.”
“Right, we were going to start using candy for that.” After nearly two months with them, Mordred’s shields are starting to get better, but he can’t sustain them for long and sometimes they won’t work at all. The reward system is Freya’s idea, since she’s the one training him most of the time; Merlin seems to be spending half his time on the radio with Morgause and Fay, consulting about who or what is in the hidden basement at Pendragon Corp. “If you promise to meditate for at least twenty minutes while I’m gone, I’ll pick up some pancake mix as well and we can have a special dinner.”
Pancakes, they’ve learned, are the one thing guaranteed to make Mordred smile, so Mordred beams at him and Merlin smiles in return before pulling his jacket on and walking towards town.
Even though Gwaine doesn’t know for sure who they are or what they’re up to (though he’s got to suspect; everyone in Ealdor must suspect), he’s offered dozens of times to deliver their supplies straight to the house. Merlin trusts Gwaine, after two years in town, even if he does have a tendency to disappear for weeks at a time, but the supply runs are usually the only time he gets off the property. Freya doesn’t like leaving, still, but he needs to get away sometimes.
As always, when he leaves the magical shields that drench the safehouse, the air feels a little too thin, like he can’t quite breathe it. Merlin hates it. He grew up feeling the magic in every tree in the park, every person he passed, but now it’s all dulled down in comparison to the roaring blaze of the protections on his house. It’s hard to notice the little sparks and tingles he loved so much with that around.
It also makes it harder to sense people coming closer when he doesn’t have an active alarm spell going, which is why he jumps and nearly incinerates the person who comes at him from the side when he’s nearly in town and grips his arm. “Merlin?”
“Keep your voice down,” he snaps, on autopilot, and turns around to find Lancelot staring at him, shaken out of his usual serene calm. Merlin knows how he feels. He hasn’t seen Lancelot since university, and nobody new ever comes here anyway. “You’re up north,” he says, even though it’s demonstrably not true.
“My wife and I--her father--”
“Perhaps we ought to start this again.” Merlin walks a few steps back into the woods that separate the safehouse from the rest of the town and Lancelot follows, his hand still clenched in Merlin’s sleeve. They sit on a fallen tree and Merlin collects his thoughts. “You got married?” he asks at last, since that’s as good a place to start as any other.
“A few months before you disappeared.” Lancelot’s face lights up, and Merlin relaxes. He’s okay. There’s someone he cares about whose life isn’t in constant danger. “Her name is Gwen. I always wanted you to meet her, but we fell out of touch, and the ceremony was small, and then you went missing.” Merlin nods. “Her father lives in town here, and we’re visiting him, on a bit of a holiday.”
“What are you doing these days?” It’s more than a bit surreal to be having such a casual conversation with an old friend with his life as it is, but it’s steadying as well.
Lancelot shifts and glances down at his lap, which is never a sign of good news coming from him. “Gwen and I run an inn, on the Mercian border.” He pauses. “We started ferrying sorcerers through it last year. Her brother found out they were looking for people and he knew that I knew you, and Gwen’s known some sorcerers too …”
“I would tell you that you shouldn’t and it’s too dangerous, but--”
“But you’re doing the same thing, closer to the source,” Lancelot finishes, then stops. “Is Freya still with you? I wanted to get in touch when I heard she went to Pendragon Corp, but I didn’t know what I could say, much less what I could do.”
“Freya’s here, yeah. You can come to the house and see her once I’ve got my groceries, if you’d like. And Gwen, if she wants. I trust you, and you trust her.”
“We’d be glad to. Gwen said those first couple of months that I never shut up about you and everything we got up to at school.”
Merlin doesn’t allow himself to miss life outside the safehouse too often. He would give a lot more for Freya’s safety, and he knows he’s doing good work, but sitting next to Lancelot is reminding him of all the other friends he left behind without even warning them, and the fact that he was saving to go to a graduate program in psychology, and a hundred other things that he’s managed to tamp down. “I’ll bet you didn’t tell her about the time you fell off the roof and I had to save your arse,” he says when he knows he’s been silent for too long.
Of course Lancelot doesn’t treat it like the joke it’s meant to be. He gets serious instead. “Of course I told her how we got to be friends.”
“Gwaine’s expecting me at the shop,” Merlin blurts. He needs time to think. “Then I’ve got to warn Freya and our current guest to expect company, so if you and Gwen want to come for dinner, things should be ready by then. I’ll set the wards to let you in. Have you got anything of hers on you?”
Lancelot just looks at him for a bit too long, and Merlin wonders if he’s going to ask what’s wrong, a question Merlin was never able to resist answering when they knew each other better. Instead of asking, though, he takes a note out of his pocket and hands it to Merlin, who holds it without reading it for a few seconds to get a sense of her essence. It reminds him so much of his mother that he wants to keep it, but he hands it back instead. “We’re staying with Tom from the hardware store, if you need to get a message to us,” says Lancelot. “Otherwise we’ll come around seven.”
“Thanks.” He shakes Lancelot’s hand, horribly awkward when they used to hug every time they saw each other, and waves him off. “You should go first. I trust everyone in town, but just in case there are ever visitors who would turn me in I like to make sure no one can be linked to me.”
Years later, he still recognizes the face Lancelot makes, the thing halfway between pity and determination that means he wants to do something stupid and noble but isn’t sure what yet. “We’ll see you tonight, Merlin.”
Merlin just waves him off, and gives him five minutes before he goes into town and to the shop. Gwaine starts chatting immediately, as he always does, and Merlin does his best to answer while he accepts the boxes they’ve ordered and puts another few items on the top, including Mordred’s candy and pancake mix. Gwaine, after considering him while he pays, puts a six-pack of cider on top of the stack with a wink before sending him off with a bit less flirting than usual.
Freya and Mordred are in the living room when he gets back, meditating, and he puts the groceries away while they finish their lesson and then calls them into the kitchen. “Lancelot is in town,” he says, even though Mordred probably doesn’t need to hear it. “He and his wife are part of the movement, in a cell up north, and he wants to come for dinner tonight. Mordred, I trust him absolutely but if you aren’t comfortable I can ask him not to come.”
“He can come,” says Mordred. “Can we still have pancakes?”
“Anyone who doesn’t like pancakes is not welcome in our home.” Mordred nods, and Merlin looks up at Freya, who’s clutching the door frame like it’s the only thing holding her up. “That goes for you, too. Just because you met him a few times doesn’t mean you still trust him.”
“No, it’s just … weird, that’s all.” She closes her eyes. “Could you radio headquarters, though? Just to make sure?”
Like happens at least once a week, Merlin wants nothing more than to track Uther Pendragon and kill him, make him feel even a tenth of what his sister felt. He grips the table and breathes while the dishes rattle, and Freya looks at the floor like she always does when they come close to mentioning it.
“Me too,” says Mordred, and turns around to walk down the hall.
*
Arthur answers his door at arse o’clock in the morning to find Morgana on the other side. “Did a rescue go wrong?” he asks immediately, because she looks shaken and not much makes her look upset, at least not that he sees. “Are you okay? Do I need to radio Morgause?”
“We need to talk, Arthur. Let me ward your flat.”
He stands aside and waits, feeling foolish in nothing but boxers and a t-shirt, while she walks around the whole flat, muttering words that make the hair on his arms stand up. “Are you done?” he asks after she sketches a rune on the door in what appears to be lipstick. Even when she’s upset she lives to make his life more difficult.
“Sit down.”
“Should I make tea?”
“Arthur, sit down.”
Even when he sees her do magic, even though he knows, it’s hard to think of Morgana as a sorceress the same way even a glance at Morgause shows that she has power, the same way he could almost feel the magic rushing under Merlin’s skin. Sometimes, though, she’ll say something and he remembers that she’s powerful in her own right. He sits down. “It’s serious, then.”
“I’ve spent the whole of tonight in a meeting with Morgause and Alice and Merlin, not to mention several others. We’ve found out who’s in the hidden basement. Alvarr and some of the others made contact, talked to all four of them, found out what sort of security they know about down there. We’ve gone through every test and scenario we can, but it looks like we can only get one of them out without getting caught or setting off alarms.”
Arthur sighs, and tries not to think about what his father will do to the three who are left. “It’s awful, Morgana, but not entirely unexpected.”
“That’s not the part that’s going to upset you.” Morgana comes and sits next to him on the sofa, taking his hand like she hasn’t for years. “It’s who’s in there.”
His stomach drops. “Tell me.”
For one second, when she just looks at him with sympathy that sits oddly on her face, Arthur has the absurd and horrifying thought that his mother is locked up down there--not dead because the spark of life that created him killed her, but alive and mad, or magic, with a whole different story behind his father’s hatred for sorcery. “First, there’s a man … he just calls himself the Dragon. Always has. Merlin took the name in his honour, because everyone thought he was dead long ago, and he was one of the best-known wizards for a while, almost as powerful as Merlin. Some of the things your father did to him …”
The sympathy is for having a monster for a father, not because he would grieve for this “Dragon” in particular. “The others are similarly powerful, I assume?” he asks, voice rough but as steady as he can make it.
“Merlin’s father.” Arthur sits up straight, knocking her hand off his shoulder. “He’s … Uther didn’t hurt him, as much, because for a while he helped. He had children at home, and the Dragon wanted Merlin, so he helped Uther get him. And then Uther took him as well.”
“So he’s the one we’ll be saving, then. Merlin deserves that, he deserves a family.”
“It’s not just about Merlin, Arthur, and don’t start making judgments until I tell you who else is down there.” She looks at the lipstick print on the door, mouth twisting. “It’s Nimueh and Gaius.”
Arthur stares at her for a long moment, waiting for the sounds to resolve themselves into something else, something that makes more sense. It doesn’t happen. “Nimueh, my godmother?” The woman who spent the first five years of his life taking him out for posh teas and to the magical zoo on the sly. His father held his hand at her funeral, the last time he did so. “Morgana, she’s dead, she died in a car crash when I was five, we know that. It can’t be her.”
“Uther kept offering and offering to let her be the first ones to try it when he found a proper cure, and she kept refusing, and he was worried about you because she was showing you magic. He tried to make her stop seeing you, and then he found out she was the one who encouraged your mother to get the fertility treatment, and he …”
“I don’t need to hear the rest of that story, thank you,” he snaps, because Morgana’s voice is too soft and sympathetic and he knew his father is misguided, knew that he does horrible things out of ignorance and grief, but never thought he would do this to his wife’s best friend. And to his own. “Gaius isn’t retired in a little cottage by the sea, then,” he adds when he trusts himself enough to talk. “He’s been locked up for the last four years? Why did Fath--why did Uther let him stay free for that long?”
“Gaius hid himself very well for a long time. Uther saw it by accident, and he was … you can imagine, I suppose. But Gaius says he doesn’t really do anything to him down there, and that he’s mostly ignored. If they manage a ‘cure’ that works and doesn’t just kill the sorcerers or drive them mad there are standing orders that he’s the first one to get it.”
Arthur breathes and waits while his world readjusts itself into a place where his father isn’t just ruthless and unreasonable, but the kind of man who would lock up his best friend and most loyal employee in a hidden basement. “Which one are we getting out, then?”
“Gaius.” He manages to look at her again, and remember just how shattered she looked when he opened the door. She only found all this out hours ago. “He knows what’s going on in the labs better than any of the others. He might be able to help some of the people who have already been released. Morgause and some of the others didn’t want to release him, since he was working against magic users for so many years, but Merlin talked them into it.”
“Merlin’s father is down there!”
“With Gaius out, we have more of a chance of getting the others out even after the security nightmare that will result. He knows Uther better than anyone.” She takes his hand. “Merlin knows to do what’s best. Are you okay, Arthur?”
“No. Let me know when I’ve got orders, would you? Unless you have them now.” Morgana shakes her head and drops his hand. “I’m not angry at you for bringing me the news, but I need to be alone to think about it.”
She kisses his forehead. “Don’t start feeling guilty for not knowing, Arthur. I never suspected either.”
“Thank you for letting me know. I imagine Morgause and the others weren’t particularly enthusiastic about telling me such important information.”
“Perhaps not, but we need you. Merlin and I both made that abundantly clear.”
Normally the subject of Merlin is one he avoids, especially around Morgana, but for once it’s safer than anything else on his mind. “The fact that Merlin trusts me that much after I threatened to kill him does not speak well of his intelligence.”
“You wouldn’t do it now. He knows that.”
It takes far too long to place the expression on Morgana’s face as the one he last saw when she tried to set him up with her friend Valiant at university. If it were a different world, this time he might be grateful. But he has to stay with his father and Merlin can’t come to the city and Arthur has no illusions about just how far anything could go. “Unless you’ve seen a big change coming, and soon, Morgana, you’ll drop this right now.”
“If I had to watch you shagging anyone in my visions, Arthur, I might actually support Uther finding a cure.” She pushes off the couch and stands. “Things are changing, but things are always changing. I can’t say anything for sure yet, and you know it. Just don’t shut off any opportunities.”
“It’s late, Morgana. Take down the wards before you go.”
She just smirks at him. “All you have to do is wash the mark off the door, and I don’t fancy cleaning in the middle of the night.” Arthur stands and lets her hug him before she goes to the door. “As soon as we know everything we’re dealing with to get Gaius out of the hidden basement you’ll get your orders. Just lay low until then.”
*
Merlin never feels more useless than he does the night he knows a big rescue is going on. He has his part at the very end, allowing those being transported through his wards and then taking care of them after, but none of it feels quite as real as his one rescue did. Tonight’s rescue, though, makes him want to transport himself to the city and leave Freya and Mordred to deal with the magic at the safehouse, or even Lancelot and Gwen, who are visiting her father again, since he’s been ill. Tonight there’s more danger than a standard rescue, with security layers they’ve spent a month working through. His father is down there, and Merlin hasn’t spoken to him in twenty years.
It’s Arthur’s first full-fledged rescue. It makes him a little sick that that’s the reason he keeps coming back to, when he should be worried that his father is actually alive and chances are that after they get Gaius out he’ll be moved somewhere even more inaccessible or even killed.
“Gwen is teaching Mordred and Freya how to use meditation to do yoga. She thinks if Mordred is concentrating on his body he’ll have better luck keeping his mind clear,” says Lancelot from the doorway.
“It might work. Gwen is good at that kind of thing, and nothing else has. We need … Gaius, I suppose. He’s a doctor, and he worked in the labs before he got trapped there.”
“Is that why you argued for his release? Mordred?” Merlin shrugs. Mordred’s the most immediate reason, the one he sees at the breakfast table every day, but he’s seen dozens of reasons that they need a doctor on their side. Not just Alice and her healing magic, but someone who knows what’s done there. Freya is still one of those reasons, for all she pretends she’s not. “You can join them if you want. I’ll watch the radio.”
“Then I’ll break an ankle and be Gaius’s first patient. A great welcome for him.” His knuckles are white where they’re gripping the radio. Gilli checked in twenty minutes ago to say they were starting. If everything goes well he probably won’t hear more until midnight at the soonest, when they get to the safe location to transport from. “Gwen and Freya do plan to put Mordred to bed eventually, don’t they?”
“He’ll just wake up when Gaius transports in.” Lancelot sits down across from him at the table but makes no move to take the radio. “Gwen and I have been talking about Mordred, a bit. It’s not fair to you and Freya to have him here. The safe house is supposed to be a long-term stop, but not forever.”
“We can’t just set him free to make his own life like we could the others once they made the right contacts. We’ve got to get him a family.”
“That’s what Gwen and I have been talking about.”
If it were anyone else, Merlin would ask if they were serious, or if they knew what they were actually getting into, taking in a mind-reader with minimal control over his powers. “It’s his choice in the end. You two will be great parents, but you don’t have magic, either, and he hasn’t had it easy.”
“We know a few mind-readers up north who might be able to help. And we won’t do it immediately. We want Gaius to have a look at him, at the very least.” Lancelot nods at the radio. “But don’t tell me that having him here doesn’t make it harder to do what you want to do.”
Merlin shakes his head. “I didn’t before Mordred came, either. Too much bother for me to transport to the city, break them out, and come back here. Besides, we’re all fugitives, but I’m the only one who ever got my name in the paper.”
“It’s not forever. The breakouts are changing public opinion, and Uther Pendragon won’t live forever. Arthur’s different.”
His gaze goes back to the radio. “I know that. The question is more how much damage he can do while he’s still around.”
“Come on. Strap the radio on in case there’s an emergency and come do yoga. Gwen won’t make you try to stand on one leg.”
Since there’s nothing else he can do at the moment, Merlin follows Lancelot down the hall to the living room and spends the next hour too tense to do any of the positions properly. It does seem to be helping Mordred, since he doesn’t give Merlin that too-knowing look he has very often, but Merlin excuses himself the first time Mordred yawns and Gwen decides it’s time to finish practicing for the night. They don’t enforce a bedtime (though Gwen and Lancelot seem to disapprove of that), but Mordred is still just a kid.
Merlin sits in near-silence, barely managing conversations with any of them who walk through the kitchen, until his radio starts in with the “urgent” tone half an hour before he was expecting anything. He flips the right switches and carries the radio outside, towards the shed where their transports are coordinated to come in. “This is the Dragon at the safe house. Who have I got?”
“Dragon, this is Wart.” Arthur is panting, and his voice is low, and Merlin doesn’t know whether to be relieved or terrified because the last he knew Gilli was doing the communication for the rescue team. “We’re having a bit of a hiccup.”
“Tell me.”
“We got the Doctor out, but we have about two minutes before an alarm goes off, and--” Arthur stops to do something. There’s no one talking in the background, just the sound of him panting while he talks. “If someone tries to transport in from station eight tonight, it is not us, do you copy that? The staff there are safe, they got out, but the place itself is compromised. Morgause had to redo her transport and it wasn’t balanced, so all of us couldn’t do. I’m getting out on my own because security is less likely to shoot me on sight than the others.”
“You’re running,” Merlin realizes, wanting to be there immediately. Less likely to be shot or not, Arthur shouldn’t be alone out there. “That’s why you sound odd.”
“They told me to radio you and tell you that they aren’t coming through eight, and to shut down your wards to anything from there. I can tell you that Pendragon’s been looking for our safe house for quite some time now and he might even use magic to get there.”
Merlin goes into the wards, shutting down the right set of transport coordinates. It’s a clumsy job, but he and Freya can do better in the morning. She’s always liked doing wards. “So where are they coming from? Is he still coming tonight?”
“She says six. If anything changes they’ll pick up another radio and get in contact with you from there. They would have told you this themselves but they thought I should have this, since I’m on my own.”
“How close to being out are you?” He presses the radio closer to his ear, like he could fall through and be there to help if he just wishes hard enough.
“Close.” Like that’s some sort of cue, an alarm sounds, the same shrill whine Merlin hears in his nightmares sometimes. “Shit. I’m on the other side of the complex from the alarm, but they’re still going to be swarming pretty soon. I’ve got to get home, otherwise it’ll be three times now that I’ve been in the building when an alarm went off.”
“I’ll let you concentrate on running, then.” He wants to be there, even just watching from outside with his eyes and his magic so he could talk Arthur out, tell him what to avoid. Now all he can think is that if security shows up and don’t care who Arthur is, Merlin will hear him die and not be able to do anything. “Be safe.”
“I’ll try my best.”
“I--” Fuck, he forgets too often that he barely knows Arthur, that they’ve talked twice and neither time under the best circumstances. That he has no right to worry and want to protect him and feel his heart clench when Arthur manages to sound that fond and amused while running for his life. “Get word to me that you get out safe,” he says when all he gets as a reply to his choked-off sentence is the sound of the alarm and Arthur’s breathing. “Radio me in the morning, if you want.” The crystal Morgause rigged to show when someone’s coming lights up, and he swears. “I’ve got to go, but let me know somehow. You shouldn’t be alone out there.”
“Okay.”
Merlin flips the radio off the channel before he can say anything else stupid and watches as his next guest starts materializing in the middle of the shed with a twist of wind. He wishes it were his father. He wishes it were Arthur.
Part Two | Part Three
Wordcount: ~26,000
Summary: Arthur Pendragon is working with a group of sorcerers that plan to take his father's company apart, but when a rescue attempt goes wrong and he's forced to go into hiding, he goes to a safehouse run by Merlin, the sorcerer who started his defection in the first place.
Warnings: For the plot: minor character death, references to imprisonment and unethical experimentation on humans, aftermath of both. For the sex: barebacking, sex magic (fully consensual). As always, if I missed a warning, I apologize and please let me know.
A/N: This is set in the same universe as Melt You Down, two years later, but this does stand alone and you don't have to read that. The title is from Muse's song "Resistance." Other than that, I have written this whole thing in a bit less than two weeks and I am just going to go collapse now.
Disclaimer: I do not own Merlin.
“You aren’t going to fuck this up.”
Arthur refuses to jump even though it’s late and he thought he was alone in the office. Instead, he takes a moment to look up from his screen to catch sight of Morgana, still dressed for work, leaning against his door. “Is that meant to be reassurance or a threat? No, wait, you must have dreamed it. Always good to have prophecy on my side.”
“I don’t need to use my talents to know this, Arthur.” He meets her eyes, a bit startled that she’s showing any faith in him at all. Most days Morgana rails against him as hard as she does against his father. “I knew you would be all right two years ago. It’s just taken a while for the others to come round, that’s all. Tonight’s the last hoop you have to jump through, I promise.”
“This is the first I’ve heard of it. You seemed quite skeptical of me at first.”
Morgana steps in and sits down at his extra chair. “Skeptical of how far along you were, maybe. Never of whether you’d get it in the end, though.”
“And what could I have possibly done to earn such faith?” He musters all the sarcasm he can and leans back in his chair. He knows when it was--of course he does, down to the exact date, maybe even the hour--but he isn’t sure exactly what impressed Morgana. Was it that he figured out she was the silent figure assisting the others? Was it that he’d waited before pulling an alarm far from where he knew the invaders were going? They’ve never really talked about it, beyond him saying he wants to help and her telling him to prove it.
“The first question you asked me that morning was whether Merlin and Freya were safe.” She smiles when he just blinks at her, a cat-that-got-the-cream smirk that puts him back on safer ground. “You could have shouted at me, since you recognized me, you could have told your father or the police, but the first words out of your mouth were asking after them.”
After Merlin, really, but he won’t say that to Morgana. She doesn’t know that the morning after a sleepless night of telling lies to security guards Arthur had rushed out to buy a paper for the answers the police wouldn’t give him, one of the pro-magic papers his father wouldn’t even use to burn, or how he sat in a coffee shop with his shoulders hunched to hide his face and saw a picture of Merlin with his arms wrapped around a girl, smiling and silly and not the dangerous creature with changeable eyes and a rough voice he’d held against his chest. The girl was his sister, the paper had explained, and he’d skimmed over phrases--”most powerful mage in Albion,” and “police found his home empty”--and wondered for the first time what was in the basement labs he’d never got to see. Merlin was always the important part. “So what do I have to do tonight? Presumably you’re here to tell me, and not working late. You aren’t wearing rescue clothes.”
“It’s too soon after Mordred. Uther thought the children’s ward was safe, so he’s raised security again.” Her mouth curls around the words “children’s ward” in a way that makes him sick, makes him think of hospitals, where things are supposed to be made better. “No, I’m here to give you a properly scrambled radio. We don’t trust mobiles,” she adds when he makes a face, and produces a radio from seemingly nowhere to hand to him. He takes it automatically. “You’ve talked to everyone you need to, but the safehouse staff needs to trust you as well. Just talk to them, and that’s all you need. On the radios we use codenames. You’ll be talking to the Dragon, he takes care of most of the communication the safehouse does--”
“I feel as if I’m in a spy film.”
“And he’ll be calling you Wart.”
Morgana smiles serenely and Arthur glares at her. “You swore never to tell anyone about that.”
“And I didn’t. I just used it as your pseudonym, that’s all. You can thank me later. He’ll be talking to you quite soon, so I’ll duck out. Text me whether it went well or not, after.” She stands to leave, then furrows her brow. “Just … don’t say anything stupid, Arthur.”
“I think I’ve been trained out of that in the last two years, don’t you?”
Her raised eyebrow means that’s far too easy an opening for her to take. “Think before you speak,” she says instead of insulting him, and ducks out.
Arthur is left in his dark office, knowing that he should probably get away from his father’s building before he answers a call from sorcerers trying to get the “volunteer test subjects” away from Pendragon Corp and shut down the company, but unwilling to go out on the street as well. Eventually he decides to trust the scrambled signal to keep the conversation from showing up on security footage and waits for the signal.
It takes fifteen minutes before the radio lets out a high-pitched beep, and Arthur immediately starts pressing buttons to make it stop. “Is that the Dragon?” he asks when he gets to slightly staticky silence, feeling foolish.
“Oh, fuck, fuck, how did you get this radio?”
And suddenly it’s two years ago and there’s a voice whispering in his ear and a warm pulse under his hand, and Arthur gapes in silence before realizing that his communication is probably about to get cut off and send the whole organization into a panic. “No, hold on, wait, please, this is Wart. I’m Wart. I’m … I thought they would have warned you. M--Fay, I thought Fay would have told you.”
“But it’s you,” Merlin says, sounding a little lost. Arthur can sympathize. He’d never expected to hear another thing about Merlin, except in his wildest dreams, because anyone smart would be out of the country and in hiding. “It can’t be you.”
“It shouldn’t be you either,” says Arthur for the lack of anything better. “I thought you would be across the world. They’re still looking for you, it can’t be safe.”
“A safe house is the safest place to be. And I can protect myself.” Arthur remembers dust falling out of his gun, gold in Merlin’s eyes; his worry is useless, of course, but that doesn’t mean he can stop. “Why are you helping us, Wart?”
Morgause asked it in a tone of deep disinterest, like his answer didn’t matter. Gilli was belligerent. Alice was gentle but firm. None of them sounded like this, confused and helpless and soft, and if Arthur didn’t know better he would think Merlin is someone who needs protecting. “After that night,” he starts, and stops, because he doesn’t quite know how to say this the right way. “You told me to figure out what was going on,” he tries instead. “The next morning, after I realized that I knew who Fay was, I asked her, and she showed me. I’d thought--I’d been told, for so long--”
“That they were volunteers,” Merlin supplies. “That they wanted to be rid of their magic and that they would let Pendragon Corp do anything and everything to take it from them.”
“But of course it wasn’t true. I shouldn’t have believed someone who hates magic this much, but he sent me to schools where I wouldn’t meet the gifted and it never occurred to me to ask.” Arthur keeps his voice as even as he can. He still wakes from dreams sweaty and nauseous, remembering the labs Morgana had walked him through after hours while she whispered with those who still had wits enough to listen. “She showed me what they do, and it’s … I can’t believe what he’s done, in the name of …”
In the name of his mother, mostly, killed by magic mere days after his birth, experiments with magical fertility treatments gone wrong. “I know this,” whispers Merlin. “Why did you decide to change it?”
“Because anyone with any human decency would,” he snaps. “Nobody deserves to be driven mad like that.”
“I think that’s the right answer.”
Arthur blinks at the radio. “Why?”
“You wouldn’t hurt us. Not any longer.” He remembers his gun at Merlin’s head and feels a hot rush of shame. “I’ll contact headquarters in the morning. You’re safe as far as I’m concerned.”
Before Arthur can say anything else, ask any questions, he’s listening to the crackle of static and nothing else.
*
Merlin bends over the second he flips off the radio and presses his forehead to his knees, trying to get a proper breath.
It could be seconds or it could be minutes before Freya comes in. “Merlin? Merlin, are you all right?”
“Is Mordred in bed?”
She sits down across the table from him and he manages to sit up, still feeling like someone punched him in the gut. Arthur, Arthur Pendragon, on his radio saying he wants to help. He’s half-expecting to wake up any second because it can’t be real. Surely someone would have told him before. “He’s reading. He does insist on reading all those violent books, and he’s still not talking much. I worry about him.”
“He’s only been here a few weeks, and on top of having been there his parents gave him to Pendragon. It will take a while.”
She looks at the radio. “Who was it? Bad news? You’re upset.”
“I just had a chat with the latest member to join the underground, and he’s safe. Wart, we’re supposed to call him.” That much Freya needs to know. The next part he probably shouldn’t say, but this is the safehouse. He’s drenched it in so much magic that phones don’t work, surveillance devices are useless, even magical eavesdropping, and he needs to say it to someone. “He’s Arthur Pendragon.”
Freya lets there be silence for a minute instead of asking if he’s sure, or if that was why he was upset, or one of a hundred other possible questions. “You trust him,” she says at last, no judgment in her tone.
That’s the important question, for them. Everyone in the underground is interrogated under truthspell before they get told anything big, but nobody joins unless they’re a hopeless idealist or a spy, and nobody thinks they’ll crack under bribes or torture or any of the other pressures Uther Pendragon can put on them. Those are the important things to know, and no spell can reveal that. Arthur Pendragon, though, won’t betray them. Merlin knows that with overwhelming and frightening certainty. “Fuck, I do. I shouldn’t. He held a gun to my head.”
He never told her the full story of that night, of telling Arthur to pull the trigger and filling him with magic and the look on his face when Merlin told him to wait. She knows enough, though, and she knows him. “He didn’t pull the alarm, though,” she says. “You’ve never sounded as if you dislike him, all the times we’ve talked about that night.”
“It’s not a matter of like or dislike. It’s that he’s Uther Pendragon’s son and there’s no way this won’t all end badly.”
“Then why did you give him the okay?”
Because he sounded like he was going to vomit at the thought of what went on in his facilities. Because when he said “human decency” he sounded like he meant it. Because two years ago, he held Merlin like he’d forgotten he was holding a gun as well. “I don’t know. I just trust him.”
“You’re shouting,” says Mordred in a high, flat voice from the door to the kitchen. Merlin starts; not many people can creep up on him, and he knows he and Freya were keeping their voices down. “In my head, you’re shouting.”
Merlin’s never been a mind-reader. That and seeing the future are the only two things he can’t do, when he’s being honest, so he isn’t quite sure what to do with Mordred’s wide, unblinking stare. Freya just sits there and lets out the shuddering breath that he recognizes from every time he’s around a mind-reader, while every secret she doesn’t want told rushes across her conscious mind. “We’re sorry, Mordred. Didn’t anyone train you to turn it off when you want to sleep or be private?” he says.
“I used to know how to turn it off, but I can’t anymore. They did something.”
They hear all kinds of stories, at the safehouse. The rescuers don’t usually talk much while they’re breaking people out, so Merlin and Freya are the first friendly faces some of these people have seen in years. Still, though, he doesn’t think he’s heard anything worse than a little boy telling him that he can’t get other people out of his head because of something Pendragon Corp did to him. “I can’t believe what he’s done,” Arthur said on the radio. Merlin is inclined to agree.
Freya stands and goes to Mordred, puts her arms around him. He doesn’t really react, but she’s whispering soothing things and probably thinking them as hard as she can as well, and hopefully that will help. Merlin’s well out of his depth with Mordred, and Freya is too, but they have to try their best until they find a family to take him in, one that can deal with a very powerful child. “I can ward your room,” he offers when Freya seems to run out of things to say. “Soak it in magic until you can’t hear anything outside it, and that way if you need to sleep or just want to be alone you can. And we’ll try to train your control back.”
“Unless whatever they did is permanent,” says Mordred, probably so he doesn’t have to worry about them thinking it. Merlin doesn’t think he could hate Uther Pendragon more than he does at this moment.
“We’ll fix it. We’ll make it better.”
“Could you ward my room?”
Freya steps aside, looking worn out and sad, and he squeezes her hand as he passes her. Hopefully she won’t disappear to her room while he’s helping Mordred. Mordred walks ahead of him down the hallway, and Merlin follows him into his room, which is still mostly bare of possessions, even though they’ve offered to get him anything he needs. “Let me know when you can’t hear Freya anymore, okay?” says Merlin when they get inside and shut the door.
Mordred just sits down on the bed, watching with wide eyes and leaving Merlin to wonder if he’s ever actually seen the kid blink. And then to apologize in his head because of course Mordred heard that. That done, he starts filling the room with magic, imagining runes for silence and protection blazing on the walls, and the world goes gold and a little too bright like it always does when he does big magic. “That’s enough,” says Mordred after nearly ten minutes, and Merlin lets go of the magic and has to brace himself against the wall while the world spins. It’s almost vibrating against his hand, a warm purr. Hopefully that will fade, or it will be distracting.
“We’ll make you a proximity alarm in the morning so you can still hear if anyone’s coming,” Merlin promises. “And we’ll work out a training schedule to get your shields back up, too. Do you think you’ll be able to sleep now?”
“I’ve got a book to read. Thank you.”
Merlin has no idea how a child that age can give such a clear dismissal, but he doesn’t question it. Instead, he waves an awkward goodnight and goes back to the kitchen, where Freya seems to be making tea. “Are you okay?” he asks.
“We aren’t set up to train a child, or even take care of one for long. Neither of us had training for mind-reading.”
“We’ll find him a family, Frey.” He boils the water with a look, just for something to do, even though she says it makes the tea taste different. “Just now we have to find him parents willing to deal with more than we’d thought before. I know what we can handle. Maybe the next person to come through will have the right skills to help. We’re bound to start getting more people with Wart’s access codes and not just Fay’s for getting into the wards.”
“And what will Pendragon’s reaction be when more and more people start escaping? He’ll change the security, or move the people.”
Freya’s twisting her hands, and Merlin grabs her wrist just to feel the pulse and remind them both that she’s safe. “We can’t fix it all at once. Morgause has told me that enough times. But they haven’t managed to pass a discrimination law since we broke you out, and we’re starting to get the children out. It will get better, yeah? We’ve got to believe that.”
*
In his first month working with Morgana and the other sorcerers, Arthur helps three people who came under his father’s scrutiny out of the city before they end up in one of his facilities and helps a rescue team with what they apparently call an “Emrys Decoy,” pulling an alarm for a supposed gas leak on the other side of the facility from whatever sorcerer they’re saving. He never finds out who it was he helped.
He knows it’s good work, and he’s not happier, precisely, but certainly more satisfied than he’s been with himself in two years. Still, Arthur feels as if everyone else is keeping him away from the sorcerers in case he decides to betray them after all. When he asks Morgana, she scoffs and says it’s because he doesn’t have enough experience yet, but he still wonders.
The first time he helps with a rescue, pressed against the wall of an alley with three other people waiting for a police car to drive by, he hears Merlin’s voice crackle across the radio and almost lunges to rip it out of Gilli’s hands. It’s just a routine check-in, Merlin letting them know that the room at the safehouse is ready even though the people from the city usually stay there less than a week, but his nervousness fades immediately and he makes a point of not asking himself why.
His father calls Arthur to his office six weeks after Merlin approves him, probably noticing that his son has been avoiding him more than usual. “You’ve seemed bored with your work lately, Arthur, and I’ve decided it’s time to give you more responsibility.”
“What do you mean, father?”
Uther Pendragon hasn’t made himself this powerful and successful by being a fool, no matter how often Morgana and Morgause call him one. Blind, yes, unyielding, of course, but not a fool. He knows Arthur’s an idealist, and he won’t show him the worst yet. He’ll work up to that. “I know that I’ve kept you from the R&D side of things since your degree was in Business Law and not the sciences, but you’ll have to know how everything works when you take the company over for me.”
“So you want me to visit the labs, or the dormitories?” Arthur keeps his voice as casual as he can manage.
“Eventually, but not yet. I do have something in mind for you, though it won’t have you working with the anti-sorcery work directly, at least not yet. I need someone to figure out where the hole in our security is and keep these ridiculous rescue groups from getting through. They’re giving us a bad name.”
Arthur nods instead of saying anything that he wishes he could. The hardest part about joining Morgana’s underground movement has been pretending that nothing has changed and that he still believes magic is evil (though he hasn’t even really had time to reconsider his stance on magic--he just knows that what his father does to sorcerers is worse than anything he’s heard of any of them doing outside of fairy tales). “I’ll audit security, see what kind of corners they’re cutting, and if they aren’t cutting any, I’ll see how the sorcerers are getting through spell-proofed doors.” Somehow without bringing Morgana’s codes into it.
His father looks pleased. Two years ago Arthur would have done anything for that proud almost-smile and the clap on his shoulder that comes next. “I’m sure you’ll do the job admirably, Arthur. I’ll get you the necessary security codes so you can see everything. Ask Morgana to give you to tour if you find yourself needing to go to the labs.”
“Thank you, Father.”
When he’s almost out of the office, his father calls him back. “Don’t tell too many people that you’re helping me with this, Arthur. I’m sure you can guess why.”
“Of course.”
The second Arthur’s out of the office that night, he calls Morgana on the cheap mobile he bought for underground calls and tells her everything his father told him. “It’s good that you’re still fooling him this well, and still better that you’ll have access codes that get you to more places without going in the records. You’ll be much more use in rescues, and there’s a matter I want to discuss with you soon about rescues that will take both of our codes and a lot of work. Not over the phone, though.”
“We’ll meet up and go for a drive this weekend, get out of the city. You can tell me then.” He pauses. “How do you go into those labs every day without going mad?”
“I just remind myself that we’ll get them out of there. It’s good that your father is trusting you more, even if it means you have to be on both sides at once. It means he’s going to retire someday, and the second he’s out of the company we’re going to take it apart brick by brick. Keep that in mind.” She sighs. “And now I’ve got to get dressed, he set me up on a blind date with yet another rich man without a single brain in his head. Take care, Wart.”
Before he can object to her using his childhood nickname outside the scrambled radio conferences when he’s forced to answer to it, Morgana hangs up her phone, leaving Arthur to spend another night fidgeting around his flat, wishing he was still interested in spending time with his uni and footie mates, the next generation of his father’s cronies. He still speaks with Leon, sometimes, but Leon’s far up the ranks in their legal department and Arthur doesn’t trust himself to lie to him. Instead of calling anyone, he turns on the telly and watches pundit after pundit on the news say that sorcerers should be forced to register with the government, something they’ve been saying in increasingly desperate tones for years now. He’s at least pleased that his father hasn’t managed that yet.
It’s a long couple of days before Saturday, when Arthur picks up Morgana (carrying what looks like a designer picnic basket) and drives them out of the city, far from anyone who would want to listen in on their conversations.
“What is it you wanted to tell me?” he asks when they’ve found a patch of mostly-dry ground in the sun to sit on and she’s staring at him over her cucumber sandwich.
“When we’ve been doing the rescues, we’ve of course been using the plans filed with security to see where everything is located and what sort of defenses we’ll have to get through.” Arthur nods; he knew that long before he was made a full member of the group. “The child we rescued, almost two months ago now, he’s a mind-reader. He said before we passed him on to Merlin that he heard people screaming from below him.”
“There’s no basement under the children’s ward,” Arthur says automatically, and realizes that he’s probably just proved whatever point Morgana is about to make.
“Morgause took some other mind-readers to the facility last weekend and had them scan for thoughts, with as much power as they could. There’s a hidden basement under the children’s ward. We could only detect four people down there, and we don’t know who they are yet, but that’s our next goal. Uther doesn’t want anyone to know about whoever’s down there and we want to take him down, so we’ve got to get them out.”
“It will have to be all of them at once or we’ll only get one,” says Arthur, half a week’s worth of looking through security files coming to mind. “If Father cares about them that much, enough to hide them on the building plans, then he’ll almost certainly move them to an even worse location the moment he’s got a hint that we can get in to them, or even kill them, unless they’re more valuable than the others. It isn’t like the others, where he can write it off as a night’s incompetence, or sorcerers being wily.”
Morgana leans back on the blanket, looking for all the world like they’re just having a friendly picnic. “Our first order of business will be to figure out who they are and why they’re down there. Then we’ll figure out how to get them out. It will be easier with both of our security codes, but it still might take a while.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
“Morgause said we shouldn’t. She’s fine with having you help on the rescues but she’s worried on letting you in on the bigger things.” Morgana smirks, like they’re teenagers again and she’s got one over on him. “Merlin and I convinced her otherwise. He asked after you, you know.”
Arthur bites his sandwich instead of answering and pretends it’s the sun making his face pink.
*
“I’m going to town,” Merlin calls up the stairs one morning. “Gwaine says our latest supplies have come in down at the shop and I want to get them as soon as I can.”
Mordred appears in his doorway down the hall as Freya calls an acknowledgment from upstairs. “Gummi worms,” he says in that eerily solemn way he has. “For rewards when I manage to put shields up.”
“Right, we were going to start using candy for that.” After nearly two months with them, Mordred’s shields are starting to get better, but he can’t sustain them for long and sometimes they won’t work at all. The reward system is Freya’s idea, since she’s the one training him most of the time; Merlin seems to be spending half his time on the radio with Morgause and Fay, consulting about who or what is in the hidden basement at Pendragon Corp. “If you promise to meditate for at least twenty minutes while I’m gone, I’ll pick up some pancake mix as well and we can have a special dinner.”
Pancakes, they’ve learned, are the one thing guaranteed to make Mordred smile, so Mordred beams at him and Merlin smiles in return before pulling his jacket on and walking towards town.
Even though Gwaine doesn’t know for sure who they are or what they’re up to (though he’s got to suspect; everyone in Ealdor must suspect), he’s offered dozens of times to deliver their supplies straight to the house. Merlin trusts Gwaine, after two years in town, even if he does have a tendency to disappear for weeks at a time, but the supply runs are usually the only time he gets off the property. Freya doesn’t like leaving, still, but he needs to get away sometimes.
As always, when he leaves the magical shields that drench the safehouse, the air feels a little too thin, like he can’t quite breathe it. Merlin hates it. He grew up feeling the magic in every tree in the park, every person he passed, but now it’s all dulled down in comparison to the roaring blaze of the protections on his house. It’s hard to notice the little sparks and tingles he loved so much with that around.
It also makes it harder to sense people coming closer when he doesn’t have an active alarm spell going, which is why he jumps and nearly incinerates the person who comes at him from the side when he’s nearly in town and grips his arm. “Merlin?”
“Keep your voice down,” he snaps, on autopilot, and turns around to find Lancelot staring at him, shaken out of his usual serene calm. Merlin knows how he feels. He hasn’t seen Lancelot since university, and nobody new ever comes here anyway. “You’re up north,” he says, even though it’s demonstrably not true.
“My wife and I--her father--”
“Perhaps we ought to start this again.” Merlin walks a few steps back into the woods that separate the safehouse from the rest of the town and Lancelot follows, his hand still clenched in Merlin’s sleeve. They sit on a fallen tree and Merlin collects his thoughts. “You got married?” he asks at last, since that’s as good a place to start as any other.
“A few months before you disappeared.” Lancelot’s face lights up, and Merlin relaxes. He’s okay. There’s someone he cares about whose life isn’t in constant danger. “Her name is Gwen. I always wanted you to meet her, but we fell out of touch, and the ceremony was small, and then you went missing.” Merlin nods. “Her father lives in town here, and we’re visiting him, on a bit of a holiday.”
“What are you doing these days?” It’s more than a bit surreal to be having such a casual conversation with an old friend with his life as it is, but it’s steadying as well.
Lancelot shifts and glances down at his lap, which is never a sign of good news coming from him. “Gwen and I run an inn, on the Mercian border.” He pauses. “We started ferrying sorcerers through it last year. Her brother found out they were looking for people and he knew that I knew you, and Gwen’s known some sorcerers too …”
“I would tell you that you shouldn’t and it’s too dangerous, but--”
“But you’re doing the same thing, closer to the source,” Lancelot finishes, then stops. “Is Freya still with you? I wanted to get in touch when I heard she went to Pendragon Corp, but I didn’t know what I could say, much less what I could do.”
“Freya’s here, yeah. You can come to the house and see her once I’ve got my groceries, if you’d like. And Gwen, if she wants. I trust you, and you trust her.”
“We’d be glad to. Gwen said those first couple of months that I never shut up about you and everything we got up to at school.”
Merlin doesn’t allow himself to miss life outside the safehouse too often. He would give a lot more for Freya’s safety, and he knows he’s doing good work, but sitting next to Lancelot is reminding him of all the other friends he left behind without even warning them, and the fact that he was saving to go to a graduate program in psychology, and a hundred other things that he’s managed to tamp down. “I’ll bet you didn’t tell her about the time you fell off the roof and I had to save your arse,” he says when he knows he’s been silent for too long.
Of course Lancelot doesn’t treat it like the joke it’s meant to be. He gets serious instead. “Of course I told her how we got to be friends.”
“Gwaine’s expecting me at the shop,” Merlin blurts. He needs time to think. “Then I’ve got to warn Freya and our current guest to expect company, so if you and Gwen want to come for dinner, things should be ready by then. I’ll set the wards to let you in. Have you got anything of hers on you?”
Lancelot just looks at him for a bit too long, and Merlin wonders if he’s going to ask what’s wrong, a question Merlin was never able to resist answering when they knew each other better. Instead of asking, though, he takes a note out of his pocket and hands it to Merlin, who holds it without reading it for a few seconds to get a sense of her essence. It reminds him so much of his mother that he wants to keep it, but he hands it back instead. “We’re staying with Tom from the hardware store, if you need to get a message to us,” says Lancelot. “Otherwise we’ll come around seven.”
“Thanks.” He shakes Lancelot’s hand, horribly awkward when they used to hug every time they saw each other, and waves him off. “You should go first. I trust everyone in town, but just in case there are ever visitors who would turn me in I like to make sure no one can be linked to me.”
Years later, he still recognizes the face Lancelot makes, the thing halfway between pity and determination that means he wants to do something stupid and noble but isn’t sure what yet. “We’ll see you tonight, Merlin.”
Merlin just waves him off, and gives him five minutes before he goes into town and to the shop. Gwaine starts chatting immediately, as he always does, and Merlin does his best to answer while he accepts the boxes they’ve ordered and puts another few items on the top, including Mordred’s candy and pancake mix. Gwaine, after considering him while he pays, puts a six-pack of cider on top of the stack with a wink before sending him off with a bit less flirting than usual.
Freya and Mordred are in the living room when he gets back, meditating, and he puts the groceries away while they finish their lesson and then calls them into the kitchen. “Lancelot is in town,” he says, even though Mordred probably doesn’t need to hear it. “He and his wife are part of the movement, in a cell up north, and he wants to come for dinner tonight. Mordred, I trust him absolutely but if you aren’t comfortable I can ask him not to come.”
“He can come,” says Mordred. “Can we still have pancakes?”
“Anyone who doesn’t like pancakes is not welcome in our home.” Mordred nods, and Merlin looks up at Freya, who’s clutching the door frame like it’s the only thing holding her up. “That goes for you, too. Just because you met him a few times doesn’t mean you still trust him.”
“No, it’s just … weird, that’s all.” She closes her eyes. “Could you radio headquarters, though? Just to make sure?”
Like happens at least once a week, Merlin wants nothing more than to track Uther Pendragon and kill him, make him feel even a tenth of what his sister felt. He grips the table and breathes while the dishes rattle, and Freya looks at the floor like she always does when they come close to mentioning it.
“Me too,” says Mordred, and turns around to walk down the hall.
*
Arthur answers his door at arse o’clock in the morning to find Morgana on the other side. “Did a rescue go wrong?” he asks immediately, because she looks shaken and not much makes her look upset, at least not that he sees. “Are you okay? Do I need to radio Morgause?”
“We need to talk, Arthur. Let me ward your flat.”
He stands aside and waits, feeling foolish in nothing but boxers and a t-shirt, while she walks around the whole flat, muttering words that make the hair on his arms stand up. “Are you done?” he asks after she sketches a rune on the door in what appears to be lipstick. Even when she’s upset she lives to make his life more difficult.
“Sit down.”
“Should I make tea?”
“Arthur, sit down.”
Even when he sees her do magic, even though he knows, it’s hard to think of Morgana as a sorceress the same way even a glance at Morgause shows that she has power, the same way he could almost feel the magic rushing under Merlin’s skin. Sometimes, though, she’ll say something and he remembers that she’s powerful in her own right. He sits down. “It’s serious, then.”
“I’ve spent the whole of tonight in a meeting with Morgause and Alice and Merlin, not to mention several others. We’ve found out who’s in the hidden basement. Alvarr and some of the others made contact, talked to all four of them, found out what sort of security they know about down there. We’ve gone through every test and scenario we can, but it looks like we can only get one of them out without getting caught or setting off alarms.”
Arthur sighs, and tries not to think about what his father will do to the three who are left. “It’s awful, Morgana, but not entirely unexpected.”
“That’s not the part that’s going to upset you.” Morgana comes and sits next to him on the sofa, taking his hand like she hasn’t for years. “It’s who’s in there.”
His stomach drops. “Tell me.”
For one second, when she just looks at him with sympathy that sits oddly on her face, Arthur has the absurd and horrifying thought that his mother is locked up down there--not dead because the spark of life that created him killed her, but alive and mad, or magic, with a whole different story behind his father’s hatred for sorcery. “First, there’s a man … he just calls himself the Dragon. Always has. Merlin took the name in his honour, because everyone thought he was dead long ago, and he was one of the best-known wizards for a while, almost as powerful as Merlin. Some of the things your father did to him …”
The sympathy is for having a monster for a father, not because he would grieve for this “Dragon” in particular. “The others are similarly powerful, I assume?” he asks, voice rough but as steady as he can make it.
“Merlin’s father.” Arthur sits up straight, knocking her hand off his shoulder. “He’s … Uther didn’t hurt him, as much, because for a while he helped. He had children at home, and the Dragon wanted Merlin, so he helped Uther get him. And then Uther took him as well.”
“So he’s the one we’ll be saving, then. Merlin deserves that, he deserves a family.”
“It’s not just about Merlin, Arthur, and don’t start making judgments until I tell you who else is down there.” She looks at the lipstick print on the door, mouth twisting. “It’s Nimueh and Gaius.”
Arthur stares at her for a long moment, waiting for the sounds to resolve themselves into something else, something that makes more sense. It doesn’t happen. “Nimueh, my godmother?” The woman who spent the first five years of his life taking him out for posh teas and to the magical zoo on the sly. His father held his hand at her funeral, the last time he did so. “Morgana, she’s dead, she died in a car crash when I was five, we know that. It can’t be her.”
“Uther kept offering and offering to let her be the first ones to try it when he found a proper cure, and she kept refusing, and he was worried about you because she was showing you magic. He tried to make her stop seeing you, and then he found out she was the one who encouraged your mother to get the fertility treatment, and he …”
“I don’t need to hear the rest of that story, thank you,” he snaps, because Morgana’s voice is too soft and sympathetic and he knew his father is misguided, knew that he does horrible things out of ignorance and grief, but never thought he would do this to his wife’s best friend. And to his own. “Gaius isn’t retired in a little cottage by the sea, then,” he adds when he trusts himself enough to talk. “He’s been locked up for the last four years? Why did Fath--why did Uther let him stay free for that long?”
“Gaius hid himself very well for a long time. Uther saw it by accident, and he was … you can imagine, I suppose. But Gaius says he doesn’t really do anything to him down there, and that he’s mostly ignored. If they manage a ‘cure’ that works and doesn’t just kill the sorcerers or drive them mad there are standing orders that he’s the first one to get it.”
Arthur breathes and waits while his world readjusts itself into a place where his father isn’t just ruthless and unreasonable, but the kind of man who would lock up his best friend and most loyal employee in a hidden basement. “Which one are we getting out, then?”
“Gaius.” He manages to look at her again, and remember just how shattered she looked when he opened the door. She only found all this out hours ago. “He knows what’s going on in the labs better than any of the others. He might be able to help some of the people who have already been released. Morgause and some of the others didn’t want to release him, since he was working against magic users for so many years, but Merlin talked them into it.”
“Merlin’s father is down there!”
“With Gaius out, we have more of a chance of getting the others out even after the security nightmare that will result. He knows Uther better than anyone.” She takes his hand. “Merlin knows to do what’s best. Are you okay, Arthur?”
“No. Let me know when I’ve got orders, would you? Unless you have them now.” Morgana shakes her head and drops his hand. “I’m not angry at you for bringing me the news, but I need to be alone to think about it.”
She kisses his forehead. “Don’t start feeling guilty for not knowing, Arthur. I never suspected either.”
“Thank you for letting me know. I imagine Morgause and the others weren’t particularly enthusiastic about telling me such important information.”
“Perhaps not, but we need you. Merlin and I both made that abundantly clear.”
Normally the subject of Merlin is one he avoids, especially around Morgana, but for once it’s safer than anything else on his mind. “The fact that Merlin trusts me that much after I threatened to kill him does not speak well of his intelligence.”
“You wouldn’t do it now. He knows that.”
It takes far too long to place the expression on Morgana’s face as the one he last saw when she tried to set him up with her friend Valiant at university. If it were a different world, this time he might be grateful. But he has to stay with his father and Merlin can’t come to the city and Arthur has no illusions about just how far anything could go. “Unless you’ve seen a big change coming, and soon, Morgana, you’ll drop this right now.”
“If I had to watch you shagging anyone in my visions, Arthur, I might actually support Uther finding a cure.” She pushes off the couch and stands. “Things are changing, but things are always changing. I can’t say anything for sure yet, and you know it. Just don’t shut off any opportunities.”
“It’s late, Morgana. Take down the wards before you go.”
She just smirks at him. “All you have to do is wash the mark off the door, and I don’t fancy cleaning in the middle of the night.” Arthur stands and lets her hug him before she goes to the door. “As soon as we know everything we’re dealing with to get Gaius out of the hidden basement you’ll get your orders. Just lay low until then.”
*
Merlin never feels more useless than he does the night he knows a big rescue is going on. He has his part at the very end, allowing those being transported through his wards and then taking care of them after, but none of it feels quite as real as his one rescue did. Tonight’s rescue, though, makes him want to transport himself to the city and leave Freya and Mordred to deal with the magic at the safehouse, or even Lancelot and Gwen, who are visiting her father again, since he’s been ill. Tonight there’s more danger than a standard rescue, with security layers they’ve spent a month working through. His father is down there, and Merlin hasn’t spoken to him in twenty years.
It’s Arthur’s first full-fledged rescue. It makes him a little sick that that’s the reason he keeps coming back to, when he should be worried that his father is actually alive and chances are that after they get Gaius out he’ll be moved somewhere even more inaccessible or even killed.
“Gwen is teaching Mordred and Freya how to use meditation to do yoga. She thinks if Mordred is concentrating on his body he’ll have better luck keeping his mind clear,” says Lancelot from the doorway.
“It might work. Gwen is good at that kind of thing, and nothing else has. We need … Gaius, I suppose. He’s a doctor, and he worked in the labs before he got trapped there.”
“Is that why you argued for his release? Mordred?” Merlin shrugs. Mordred’s the most immediate reason, the one he sees at the breakfast table every day, but he’s seen dozens of reasons that they need a doctor on their side. Not just Alice and her healing magic, but someone who knows what’s done there. Freya is still one of those reasons, for all she pretends she’s not. “You can join them if you want. I’ll watch the radio.”
“Then I’ll break an ankle and be Gaius’s first patient. A great welcome for him.” His knuckles are white where they’re gripping the radio. Gilli checked in twenty minutes ago to say they were starting. If everything goes well he probably won’t hear more until midnight at the soonest, when they get to the safe location to transport from. “Gwen and Freya do plan to put Mordred to bed eventually, don’t they?”
“He’ll just wake up when Gaius transports in.” Lancelot sits down across from him at the table but makes no move to take the radio. “Gwen and I have been talking about Mordred, a bit. It’s not fair to you and Freya to have him here. The safe house is supposed to be a long-term stop, but not forever.”
“We can’t just set him free to make his own life like we could the others once they made the right contacts. We’ve got to get him a family.”
“That’s what Gwen and I have been talking about.”
If it were anyone else, Merlin would ask if they were serious, or if they knew what they were actually getting into, taking in a mind-reader with minimal control over his powers. “It’s his choice in the end. You two will be great parents, but you don’t have magic, either, and he hasn’t had it easy.”
“We know a few mind-readers up north who might be able to help. And we won’t do it immediately. We want Gaius to have a look at him, at the very least.” Lancelot nods at the radio. “But don’t tell me that having him here doesn’t make it harder to do what you want to do.”
Merlin shakes his head. “I didn’t before Mordred came, either. Too much bother for me to transport to the city, break them out, and come back here. Besides, we’re all fugitives, but I’m the only one who ever got my name in the paper.”
“It’s not forever. The breakouts are changing public opinion, and Uther Pendragon won’t live forever. Arthur’s different.”
His gaze goes back to the radio. “I know that. The question is more how much damage he can do while he’s still around.”
“Come on. Strap the radio on in case there’s an emergency and come do yoga. Gwen won’t make you try to stand on one leg.”
Since there’s nothing else he can do at the moment, Merlin follows Lancelot down the hall to the living room and spends the next hour too tense to do any of the positions properly. It does seem to be helping Mordred, since he doesn’t give Merlin that too-knowing look he has very often, but Merlin excuses himself the first time Mordred yawns and Gwen decides it’s time to finish practicing for the night. They don’t enforce a bedtime (though Gwen and Lancelot seem to disapprove of that), but Mordred is still just a kid.
Merlin sits in near-silence, barely managing conversations with any of them who walk through the kitchen, until his radio starts in with the “urgent” tone half an hour before he was expecting anything. He flips the right switches and carries the radio outside, towards the shed where their transports are coordinated to come in. “This is the Dragon at the safe house. Who have I got?”
“Dragon, this is Wart.” Arthur is panting, and his voice is low, and Merlin doesn’t know whether to be relieved or terrified because the last he knew Gilli was doing the communication for the rescue team. “We’re having a bit of a hiccup.”
“Tell me.”
“We got the Doctor out, but we have about two minutes before an alarm goes off, and--” Arthur stops to do something. There’s no one talking in the background, just the sound of him panting while he talks. “If someone tries to transport in from station eight tonight, it is not us, do you copy that? The staff there are safe, they got out, but the place itself is compromised. Morgause had to redo her transport and it wasn’t balanced, so all of us couldn’t do. I’m getting out on my own because security is less likely to shoot me on sight than the others.”
“You’re running,” Merlin realizes, wanting to be there immediately. Less likely to be shot or not, Arthur shouldn’t be alone out there. “That’s why you sound odd.”
“They told me to radio you and tell you that they aren’t coming through eight, and to shut down your wards to anything from there. I can tell you that Pendragon’s been looking for our safe house for quite some time now and he might even use magic to get there.”
Merlin goes into the wards, shutting down the right set of transport coordinates. It’s a clumsy job, but he and Freya can do better in the morning. She’s always liked doing wards. “So where are they coming from? Is he still coming tonight?”
“She says six. If anything changes they’ll pick up another radio and get in contact with you from there. They would have told you this themselves but they thought I should have this, since I’m on my own.”
“How close to being out are you?” He presses the radio closer to his ear, like he could fall through and be there to help if he just wishes hard enough.
“Close.” Like that’s some sort of cue, an alarm sounds, the same shrill whine Merlin hears in his nightmares sometimes. “Shit. I’m on the other side of the complex from the alarm, but they’re still going to be swarming pretty soon. I’ve got to get home, otherwise it’ll be three times now that I’ve been in the building when an alarm went off.”
“I’ll let you concentrate on running, then.” He wants to be there, even just watching from outside with his eyes and his magic so he could talk Arthur out, tell him what to avoid. Now all he can think is that if security shows up and don’t care who Arthur is, Merlin will hear him die and not be able to do anything. “Be safe.”
“I’ll try my best.”
“I--” Fuck, he forgets too often that he barely knows Arthur, that they’ve talked twice and neither time under the best circumstances. That he has no right to worry and want to protect him and feel his heart clench when Arthur manages to sound that fond and amused while running for his life. “Get word to me that you get out safe,” he says when all he gets as a reply to his choked-off sentence is the sound of the alarm and Arthur’s breathing. “Radio me in the morning, if you want.” The crystal Morgause rigged to show when someone’s coming lights up, and he swears. “I’ve got to go, but let me know somehow. You shouldn’t be alone out there.”
“Okay.”
Merlin flips the radio off the channel before he can say anything else stupid and watches as his next guest starts materializing in the middle of the shed with a twist of wind. He wishes it were his father. He wishes it were Arthur.
Part Two | Part Three