Scrubbing Out the Stains
Title: Scrubbing Out the Stains
Wordcount: ~3,500
Warnings: 5x13 spoilers, in case anyone has not yet seen: [Spoiler (click to open)]this is an afterlife fic, thus this fic comes with warnings for major character death and grief It's mostly gen but pairings include past Arthur/Gwen and Merlin/Freya and some Arthur/Merlin if you squint
Summary: Arthur wakes on the isle of Avalon, where he learns from its lady about his past and future.
A/N: The Arthur-POV fic for the four post-canon fics I'm writing (which are not necessarily congruent, for those who may be confused or not wanting to pick up a series in the middle). A lot of it comes from my life for Arthur&Freya in fics. Title is from Regina Spektor's "Open."
Disclaimer: I do not own Merlin.
The first thing Arthur notices is a cool, damp cloth on his bare skin, and he only has time to think Gwen and Merlin must have saved me after all before he slips back into the clinging darkness.
When he wakes again, it’s to light filtering through trees and someone’s smooth fingers on his forehead. Arthur forces his head to move, wondering who’s there, and sees a girl he doesn’t recognize, dark hair and pale skin and a grave expression. “Hush,” she says before he can speak. “People want to see you, but you must be well first.”
Her voice is soothing, and he finds he can’t speak to ask where he is, why he’s in the woods without Merlin.
*
The next time he wakes it’s in an airy room with stone walls and a window almost big enough to stand in, a summer sea breeze blowing through and ruffling the filmy cloth covering. “Where am I?” he asks. His throat is parched.
The same girl from before supports his shoulders and gives him water. “Avalon.”
Arthur sighs and lies back again. “I did die, then.”
“You did,” she agrees. She’s turned away, looking out the window, but she smoothes his hair from his face like it’s a familiar gesture. “That doesn’t mean it’s the end of anything.”
“Gwen, though. Camelot.” He pauses. “Merlin.”
It’s the last name that makes her turn to face him. “They all grieve, the same way you would to lose any of them. Rest assured none of you are losing each other for eternity. There will be chances to learn from your mistakes.”
“There were so many.” The new knowledge of Merlin’s magic, the reveal of the secret Arthur’s always known he had, stings now that he has all the time in the world instead of none at all.
“And not all of them were yours. There are others here, ones you must speak to.” The wind blows a little colder. “But not yet. Sleep, Arthur. You have all the time you need.”
*
Arthur is on a soft blanket on even softer grass, warm afternoon sun beating down on him. “Why have I moved again?” he asks blearily.
The strange woman, a few feet away twisting stems of grass into something elaborate, laughs and turns to him. “You’ll learn the way of Avalon soon enough. For now, I must watch over you, but it doesn’t mean your sickbed must always look the same.”
“Who are you?” he finally thinks to ask.
“The lady of this isle.” Her smile goes sad and a little distant. “I don’t think Merlin knew what would become of me. I was simply the first one to be sent here, to prepare it for the rest, even if I was not the first to be lost. I suppose that makes me its protector.”
Arthur swallows at the mention of Merlin, at another story, another lie uncovered. He could ask her, learn when it was that she died and came to Avalon, but he isn’t sure he wants to hear the explanations from someone else’s lips. “Your name, though,” he says when he can.
“Freya.”
*
He wakes from formless nightmares with his hand clutched around the hilt of his sword, his. “Where did this come from?” he asks blearily.
“You’ve never let go of it. You woke for the first time when it … when he returned it to you.” Arthur is in the room with the window again, and Freya is knitting with sturdy wool yarn, sitting on the window sill; it looks like nothing more than a continuation of whatever she was weaving out of grass. “I was its keeper for a while,” she adds unexpectedly. “Or perhaps it was mine, since it was here first, before Merlin needed it again. It’s yours now, though. It was made for you.”
Once again, Arthur is struck with the desire to cover his ears, to keep from hearing any more of what he missed of his own life until Merlin can say it himself. Instead, he unwraps his hand from the sword’s hilt and looks at it again. “I should …”
“Arthur.” He looks at her, and she comes to sit on the edge of his bed, hand over his. “If you wish only to hear the story of your destiny from Merlin, you will have a long wait.”
Relief and grief tie together so tight he almost chokes. “He will live a long life, then?”
“Not the way you mean. There is a long separation before you. Lifetimes of it.” She covers her eyes for a second before meeting his again. “We will all be without him. The question is just what we do with the time.”
*
Arthur is awake more often, after that. Freya allows him to sit, and then to stand, and starts to leave him sometimes, leaving with weavings or knittings or carvings and returning with the raw materials for more. While she’s gone, the world seems to flicker around Arthur, settling now on a familiar castle room, now on a tent in the dark woods, now on top of a cloud at sunset like he used to foolishly imagine as a child. Freya has her favorite places, and her power tethers them both there when she is present, but she begins to teach Arthur as well, how to choose a place and stay there. At first, it feels like a betrayal of his whole life, like learning magic, but he keeps his mind on Merlin and the Druids and learns what Freya teaches him.
“You said there were others,” he says after a matter of days-or weeks. Time moves differently in Avalon, just as he might choose to be in a field in the morning one moment and watching an ocean sunset the next, and Arthur has no sense of urgency, now that Freya has assured him nothing will make Albion need him any faster and he may as well take his time.
She hums and shades her eyes to look at him. Arthur is running a few easy drills with the sword she calls Excalibur, the one they both have had their stake in. He feels as weak as a child, but reminds himself that it is no different from a long illness. He has time to get his skill back. “There are. You may be ready. Not for everyone, but for some.” She smiles. “There is one who has been impatient for news of you.”
“Are all …” He swallows. “Are all those I’ve lost here? All who died?”
Freya hesitates. “Some are … harder to get to. Not impossible, but more difficult. And some are merely a breath away but I am not sure you would be ready to listen to what they have to say.”
“If I ask for names, will you give them to me?”
“I don’t have to. You can already guess.” She sighs and stands up, brushes her hands off on her skirt. The dress she wears most often is reddish purple and seems oddly rich for who she is, and sometimes it reminds him of the dresses Morgana used to wear, before everything went wrong. Today the hem is muddy from the dew on the field, but the way she straightens her shoulders makes that pale into insignificance. For the first time, Arthur sees what she might mean when she says she’s the lady of the isle. “Just remember that if you leave this place and still think them your enemies, your story will end just as it did once again, and you and Merlin have both worked too hard for that.”
Arthur nods, just as he would to Gwen across a council table. “I will try.”
As easily as that, she’s a girl again. “That’s all I can ask of you.”
*
Some time later, after Arthur sleeps again and trains his body until he feels that he can protect himself, should a threat arise, Freya finds him in the garden he dreamed up. It’s nowhere he’s ever been, maybe nowhere that exists, but he looks at the beds of flowers and thinks of Gwen, and it’s where he goes when the weight of all he’s lost crashes down on him. Freya almost never interrupts him while he’s there, but this time she walks in with a smile on her face and holds her hand out, expecting him to take it. “You’re ready to meet the one who’s been asking about you the most. She’s been waiting a long time, Arthur. Will you go to her?”
Arthur doesn’t ask who it is; Freya is smiling as though she has a secret, so he takes the hand she offers. “I’ll go. Though I don’t know how to leave … spaces of my own making.”
“Through a door,” says Freya, and when Arthur turns, there’s a door in the garden hedge. Even though there are fields beyond, visible over the border, when he opens the door he finds himself in a place he doesn’t recognize. It’s a lakeshore, an island, with a stone building that is more a temple than a castle in the center of it. “This is Avalon’s true form, as much as it has one,” Freya says when he looks around it. “But when we get inside, you’ll find a door that’s yours, and when you go through it you’ll be where we’ve been all this time. Today, we’re going somewhere else.”
Inside, it’s warm and smoky-smelling, hung with tapestries showing events he doesn’t recognize. There are chairs and places to lounge in some of the bigger rooms, all unoccupied, though there’s a fire going out in one of the hearths, like perhaps he’s only missed a gathering. “Is this where we come if we want company?”
“Yes, unless you are invited to someone’s private place, as you are today.”
Freya leads him to a door, just the same as all the other doors, and knocks before she swings it open and-
He’s in the council chambers of Camelot, but not as he remembers them. They’re a little brighter, a little cleaner, and empty of the bustle of people he’s used to, as well as of the stacks of papers Merlin and Gwen were always scolding him for leaving about. And there, in the light from the windows, is a woman with blonde hair and a hesitant expression. “Mother,” Arthur chokes, and walks into her outstretched arms.
*
Freya leaves him with Ygraine for a long time. There is, he’s discovering now that he’s mostly recovered, no need to sleep or eat on Avalon unless he wishes to, so it could be days that he stays with his mother in the place she calls hers, wandering through the landscapes she’s created for herself.
There is much to speak of, for both of them. Ygraine first tells him that she was called from beyond the veil to speak to him by Morgause’s spell, and Arthur has to struggle over the sudden flare of anger at Merlin. It seems the parts of their story he doesn’t know are endless. She speaks of life in Camelot before her death, magic and priestesses and dragons and the ever-present hope of a child. He tells her the story of his life, though some of it she already seems to know, and apologizes every time what he tells her seems to make her sadder.
“Is Father here?” he dares to ask when they seem to run out of words. Sometimes he worries that when he looked back at his father’s spirit and allowed it to return to the world he denied him all access to Avalon, and others he worries that Uther’s hatred for magic, what Arthur is coming to recognize as blindness at best and hypocrisy at worst, has done the same.
Ygraine winces. “Somewhere, I believe. It could be that he isn’t healed enough yet to be with the rest of us, or simply that he does not wish to be. It’s best to find people and allow them to find you in their own time. I have not seen him, but I don’t know if either of us is ready for that.”
“Who do you see, then?”
“Freya, though I did not know her in life. A friend from when I lived, another sorceress I knew only as the daughter of a friend.” He is so used to her being spoken of as a paragon and a perfect lady that sometimes the wicked tilt to her smile surprises him. “You may like them, once you give yourself and them a chance. We all only do what we are taught.”
Arthur nods, and wonders if Freya made this his first visit in hopes that it would shame him into giving everyone else an opportunity to prove themselves different from what he imagines. “Am I the only man on this mythic isle, then?” he asks after a moment. “The only one going out in company, that is.”
“Certainly not. You have knights here.”
“Knights?” It hadn’t occurred to him to hope that Elyan would be here waiting for him somewhere, but he doesn’t know why there would be more than one, at least of his knights. “Which ones?”
His mother laughs. “I should have known. Lancelot, Elyan, and just very recently one named Gwaine.”
“Gwaine? I hadn’t even known he was …” Merlin is even more lonely than Arthur had assumed, then. “Lancelot, though, I’m not sure-”
“Once again, you must trust that not everything is so clear-cut as you believed it was when you were out in the world.” She wraps his hand in hers. “He’s a good man, Arthur, who was forced to become something he was not.”
Arthur sighs. “Another one of those stories I should have heard from Merlin, I suppose.”
“I imagine it was easier to forgive him when you knew you would lose nothing by it, not even your own illusions,” she says, a little tartly.
“I’m trying. Freya tells me that it’s up to me, making everything better when we get the chance to try again.”
Ygraine shakes her head. “It’s up to all of us.”
*
It could be days or months before Ygraine tilts her head and a door appears in the library she has built them. “Nimueh has been trying to see me for a while now,” she says, an apology in her voice. “And we will have more time to see each other, I promise you that. Freya says that when a few more people are ready to be out of their rooms there will be a feast for us all. Go see your knights, or my sorceresses.”
Arthur leaves with a kiss to her cheek and passes a woman with dark hair and bright blue eyes on his way, one who looks familiar and makes him uneasy but doesn’t do more than nod at him with an ironic smile before she disappears into the place he left.
Freya finds him before he has the chance to wander. “There’s someone else I want you to see, and she can’t come to you yet. She’s very ill, yet. Not everyone’s transitions here are easy. We all have poisons to purge ourselves of.”
When he follows her through another door, Arthur isn’t surprised to find Morgana on the bed, shifting restlessly, hair fanned and tangled on the pillow. She’s asleep, or unconscious, in the seaside room Freya seems fond of for convalescents. “Another person I am to learn to forgive? Must I forgive Mordred as well, for wielding the sword that killed me?”
“When you are ready, and when they make amends-and when you do the same for them. There are two sides to every story, you know that. You’ve learned it.” She pauses and soothes her hand over Morgana’s brow. “She calls out for you in her sleep, sometimes.”
“Calling for my head, I suppose?”
“Calling out for comfort.” Freya shrugs. “You are her brother, after all. It’s up to the two of you whether that means less or more than the fact that you’re enemies. Now come along, Morgause will want to get back to tending her and I’m not sure you want to see her yet.”
*
Arthur is left to his own devices more after that, to have long conversations with everyone and learn what he doesn’t know about the story of his own life. He reconciles with Lancelot, assures Elyan that his sister is queen of Camelot and undoubtedly doing a better job than Arthur ever would have done without her, and has a short, awkward conversation with Gwaine about Merlin, apologies and grief that neither of them mentions afterwards. He trains with his knights, more for play than for real. He spends meals with his mother and Freya and, as time goes on and he loses his wariness and tries for truces, if not forgiveness on either side, Nimueh and Morgause.
Morgana, when she finally comes out of her rooms, is quiet and pale, reminding Arthur of how she was before she disappeared from Camelot that first time. She looks at him like he’s a ghost and he wonders what his own face gives away when he meets her eyes, but neither of them is ready for a reconciliation yet. Arthur reminds himself that in the end they will have the time they need. Freya assures him of that.
Sometimes the grief for those he has lost strikes him seemingly out of nowhere-Arthur may be the one dead, but he has lost friends as thoroughly as they have lost him. He may (he wishes and hopes even as he prays it won’t be any time soon) have Gwen again, and Leon and Percival and even Gaius, but he longs for Merlin too, to hear the truth and learn more of magic and forgive him all over again when he will be there to act on his forgiveness this time. Merlin, though, is on a path different from his, and they’ll be separated across lifetimes, maybe centuries somehow.
Freya finds him once when the grief is at its worst and leads him wordlessly to a door that he thought led nowhere. “When I show you this,” she warns him, “you will be tempted never to leave it. It is that way with all of us at first-your mother was the first here, but I was given care of Avalon because she wasted away years here, watching you and your father. It took Nimueh to draw her away and care for her to stop it.”
“Watching-we can see the world?” It takes everything Arthur has not to push Freya aside to get through the door. Instead, he waits the few seconds before Freya nods at whatever she sees in his face and pushes the door open.
It doesn’t open into someone else’s personal vision, but, for once, into a room that looks as though it is part of the stone structure that stands on the isle of Avalon. There’s little in it, not even a chair, but there is a window, and that’s where Freya leads him. “Think of who you wish to see and looks outside,” she says, taking hold of his hand.
His first thought is of some way of seeing that his kingdom is whole and thriving, his second of seeing Gwen, but he has faith in the latter to take care of the former, and in Leon and Percival to take care of Gwen. Merlin, without himself or Gwaine, he is more worried about, so it’s Merlin’s face he calls to mind.
Freya lets out a soft noise when the mist outside the window clears to show Merlin, and Arthur lets her have her privacy. He doesn’t need to know what history she has with Merlin, let alone what feeling, so instead he looks his fill. Merlin looks sad and worn, a few unfamiliar lines in his face-has it been so long since Arthur’s death? His hair isn’t yet grey, but he does look older. He is sitting at the lakeshore, feet in the water and boots next to him, and he’s idly doing something with his hands (braiding grass, it appears) as he looks out over the water.
“Merlin,” Arthur says, uselessly, and reaches out as if to touch him, cuff his shoulder and jolly him into a better mood as he did so many times.
Merlin, where he sits, startles and looks up, his eyes seeming to meet Arthur’s for just one hopeful, breathless second before the mist rises up in front of the window again. Freya lets out a low, sad sound, and Arthur holds her hand so tight he worries he’s hurting for her, never taking his eyes away from the window. He can see why his mother spent years entranced by it, and is already warning himself away from it, warning himself that watching Merlin, Gwen and Camelot is not his task.
It means a great deal, though, to believe at least that he will see them again. He’s willing to believe in destiny, if that’s what it means.
Wordcount: ~3,500
Warnings: 5x13 spoilers, in case anyone has not yet seen: [Spoiler (click to open)]this is an afterlife fic, thus this fic comes with warnings for major character death and grief It's mostly gen but pairings include past Arthur/Gwen and Merlin/Freya and some Arthur/Merlin if you squint
Summary: Arthur wakes on the isle of Avalon, where he learns from its lady about his past and future.
A/N: The Arthur-POV fic for the four post-canon fics I'm writing (which are not necessarily congruent, for those who may be confused or not wanting to pick up a series in the middle). A lot of it comes from my life for Arthur&Freya in fics. Title is from Regina Spektor's "Open."
Disclaimer: I do not own Merlin.
The first thing Arthur notices is a cool, damp cloth on his bare skin, and he only has time to think Gwen and Merlin must have saved me after all before he slips back into the clinging darkness.
When he wakes again, it’s to light filtering through trees and someone’s smooth fingers on his forehead. Arthur forces his head to move, wondering who’s there, and sees a girl he doesn’t recognize, dark hair and pale skin and a grave expression. “Hush,” she says before he can speak. “People want to see you, but you must be well first.”
Her voice is soothing, and he finds he can’t speak to ask where he is, why he’s in the woods without Merlin.
*
The next time he wakes it’s in an airy room with stone walls and a window almost big enough to stand in, a summer sea breeze blowing through and ruffling the filmy cloth covering. “Where am I?” he asks. His throat is parched.
The same girl from before supports his shoulders and gives him water. “Avalon.”
Arthur sighs and lies back again. “I did die, then.”
“You did,” she agrees. She’s turned away, looking out the window, but she smoothes his hair from his face like it’s a familiar gesture. “That doesn’t mean it’s the end of anything.”
“Gwen, though. Camelot.” He pauses. “Merlin.”
It’s the last name that makes her turn to face him. “They all grieve, the same way you would to lose any of them. Rest assured none of you are losing each other for eternity. There will be chances to learn from your mistakes.”
“There were so many.” The new knowledge of Merlin’s magic, the reveal of the secret Arthur’s always known he had, stings now that he has all the time in the world instead of none at all.
“And not all of them were yours. There are others here, ones you must speak to.” The wind blows a little colder. “But not yet. Sleep, Arthur. You have all the time you need.”
*
Arthur is on a soft blanket on even softer grass, warm afternoon sun beating down on him. “Why have I moved again?” he asks blearily.
The strange woman, a few feet away twisting stems of grass into something elaborate, laughs and turns to him. “You’ll learn the way of Avalon soon enough. For now, I must watch over you, but it doesn’t mean your sickbed must always look the same.”
“Who are you?” he finally thinks to ask.
“The lady of this isle.” Her smile goes sad and a little distant. “I don’t think Merlin knew what would become of me. I was simply the first one to be sent here, to prepare it for the rest, even if I was not the first to be lost. I suppose that makes me its protector.”
Arthur swallows at the mention of Merlin, at another story, another lie uncovered. He could ask her, learn when it was that she died and came to Avalon, but he isn’t sure he wants to hear the explanations from someone else’s lips. “Your name, though,” he says when he can.
“Freya.”
*
He wakes from formless nightmares with his hand clutched around the hilt of his sword, his. “Where did this come from?” he asks blearily.
“You’ve never let go of it. You woke for the first time when it … when he returned it to you.” Arthur is in the room with the window again, and Freya is knitting with sturdy wool yarn, sitting on the window sill; it looks like nothing more than a continuation of whatever she was weaving out of grass. “I was its keeper for a while,” she adds unexpectedly. “Or perhaps it was mine, since it was here first, before Merlin needed it again. It’s yours now, though. It was made for you.”
Once again, Arthur is struck with the desire to cover his ears, to keep from hearing any more of what he missed of his own life until Merlin can say it himself. Instead, he unwraps his hand from the sword’s hilt and looks at it again. “I should …”
“Arthur.” He looks at her, and she comes to sit on the edge of his bed, hand over his. “If you wish only to hear the story of your destiny from Merlin, you will have a long wait.”
Relief and grief tie together so tight he almost chokes. “He will live a long life, then?”
“Not the way you mean. There is a long separation before you. Lifetimes of it.” She covers her eyes for a second before meeting his again. “We will all be without him. The question is just what we do with the time.”
*
Arthur is awake more often, after that. Freya allows him to sit, and then to stand, and starts to leave him sometimes, leaving with weavings or knittings or carvings and returning with the raw materials for more. While she’s gone, the world seems to flicker around Arthur, settling now on a familiar castle room, now on a tent in the dark woods, now on top of a cloud at sunset like he used to foolishly imagine as a child. Freya has her favorite places, and her power tethers them both there when she is present, but she begins to teach Arthur as well, how to choose a place and stay there. At first, it feels like a betrayal of his whole life, like learning magic, but he keeps his mind on Merlin and the Druids and learns what Freya teaches him.
“You said there were others,” he says after a matter of days-or weeks. Time moves differently in Avalon, just as he might choose to be in a field in the morning one moment and watching an ocean sunset the next, and Arthur has no sense of urgency, now that Freya has assured him nothing will make Albion need him any faster and he may as well take his time.
She hums and shades her eyes to look at him. Arthur is running a few easy drills with the sword she calls Excalibur, the one they both have had their stake in. He feels as weak as a child, but reminds himself that it is no different from a long illness. He has time to get his skill back. “There are. You may be ready. Not for everyone, but for some.” She smiles. “There is one who has been impatient for news of you.”
“Are all …” He swallows. “Are all those I’ve lost here? All who died?”
Freya hesitates. “Some are … harder to get to. Not impossible, but more difficult. And some are merely a breath away but I am not sure you would be ready to listen to what they have to say.”
“If I ask for names, will you give them to me?”
“I don’t have to. You can already guess.” She sighs and stands up, brushes her hands off on her skirt. The dress she wears most often is reddish purple and seems oddly rich for who she is, and sometimes it reminds him of the dresses Morgana used to wear, before everything went wrong. Today the hem is muddy from the dew on the field, but the way she straightens her shoulders makes that pale into insignificance. For the first time, Arthur sees what she might mean when she says she’s the lady of the isle. “Just remember that if you leave this place and still think them your enemies, your story will end just as it did once again, and you and Merlin have both worked too hard for that.”
Arthur nods, just as he would to Gwen across a council table. “I will try.”
As easily as that, she’s a girl again. “That’s all I can ask of you.”
*
Some time later, after Arthur sleeps again and trains his body until he feels that he can protect himself, should a threat arise, Freya finds him in the garden he dreamed up. It’s nowhere he’s ever been, maybe nowhere that exists, but he looks at the beds of flowers and thinks of Gwen, and it’s where he goes when the weight of all he’s lost crashes down on him. Freya almost never interrupts him while he’s there, but this time she walks in with a smile on her face and holds her hand out, expecting him to take it. “You’re ready to meet the one who’s been asking about you the most. She’s been waiting a long time, Arthur. Will you go to her?”
Arthur doesn’t ask who it is; Freya is smiling as though she has a secret, so he takes the hand she offers. “I’ll go. Though I don’t know how to leave … spaces of my own making.”
“Through a door,” says Freya, and when Arthur turns, there’s a door in the garden hedge. Even though there are fields beyond, visible over the border, when he opens the door he finds himself in a place he doesn’t recognize. It’s a lakeshore, an island, with a stone building that is more a temple than a castle in the center of it. “This is Avalon’s true form, as much as it has one,” Freya says when he looks around it. “But when we get inside, you’ll find a door that’s yours, and when you go through it you’ll be where we’ve been all this time. Today, we’re going somewhere else.”
Inside, it’s warm and smoky-smelling, hung with tapestries showing events he doesn’t recognize. There are chairs and places to lounge in some of the bigger rooms, all unoccupied, though there’s a fire going out in one of the hearths, like perhaps he’s only missed a gathering. “Is this where we come if we want company?”
“Yes, unless you are invited to someone’s private place, as you are today.”
Freya leads him to a door, just the same as all the other doors, and knocks before she swings it open and-
He’s in the council chambers of Camelot, but not as he remembers them. They’re a little brighter, a little cleaner, and empty of the bustle of people he’s used to, as well as of the stacks of papers Merlin and Gwen were always scolding him for leaving about. And there, in the light from the windows, is a woman with blonde hair and a hesitant expression. “Mother,” Arthur chokes, and walks into her outstretched arms.
*
Freya leaves him with Ygraine for a long time. There is, he’s discovering now that he’s mostly recovered, no need to sleep or eat on Avalon unless he wishes to, so it could be days that he stays with his mother in the place she calls hers, wandering through the landscapes she’s created for herself.
There is much to speak of, for both of them. Ygraine first tells him that she was called from beyond the veil to speak to him by Morgause’s spell, and Arthur has to struggle over the sudden flare of anger at Merlin. It seems the parts of their story he doesn’t know are endless. She speaks of life in Camelot before her death, magic and priestesses and dragons and the ever-present hope of a child. He tells her the story of his life, though some of it she already seems to know, and apologizes every time what he tells her seems to make her sadder.
“Is Father here?” he dares to ask when they seem to run out of words. Sometimes he worries that when he looked back at his father’s spirit and allowed it to return to the world he denied him all access to Avalon, and others he worries that Uther’s hatred for magic, what Arthur is coming to recognize as blindness at best and hypocrisy at worst, has done the same.
Ygraine winces. “Somewhere, I believe. It could be that he isn’t healed enough yet to be with the rest of us, or simply that he does not wish to be. It’s best to find people and allow them to find you in their own time. I have not seen him, but I don’t know if either of us is ready for that.”
“Who do you see, then?”
“Freya, though I did not know her in life. A friend from when I lived, another sorceress I knew only as the daughter of a friend.” He is so used to her being spoken of as a paragon and a perfect lady that sometimes the wicked tilt to her smile surprises him. “You may like them, once you give yourself and them a chance. We all only do what we are taught.”
Arthur nods, and wonders if Freya made this his first visit in hopes that it would shame him into giving everyone else an opportunity to prove themselves different from what he imagines. “Am I the only man on this mythic isle, then?” he asks after a moment. “The only one going out in company, that is.”
“Certainly not. You have knights here.”
“Knights?” It hadn’t occurred to him to hope that Elyan would be here waiting for him somewhere, but he doesn’t know why there would be more than one, at least of his knights. “Which ones?”
His mother laughs. “I should have known. Lancelot, Elyan, and just very recently one named Gwaine.”
“Gwaine? I hadn’t even known he was …” Merlin is even more lonely than Arthur had assumed, then. “Lancelot, though, I’m not sure-”
“Once again, you must trust that not everything is so clear-cut as you believed it was when you were out in the world.” She wraps his hand in hers. “He’s a good man, Arthur, who was forced to become something he was not.”
Arthur sighs. “Another one of those stories I should have heard from Merlin, I suppose.”
“I imagine it was easier to forgive him when you knew you would lose nothing by it, not even your own illusions,” she says, a little tartly.
“I’m trying. Freya tells me that it’s up to me, making everything better when we get the chance to try again.”
Ygraine shakes her head. “It’s up to all of us.”
*
It could be days or months before Ygraine tilts her head and a door appears in the library she has built them. “Nimueh has been trying to see me for a while now,” she says, an apology in her voice. “And we will have more time to see each other, I promise you that. Freya says that when a few more people are ready to be out of their rooms there will be a feast for us all. Go see your knights, or my sorceresses.”
Arthur leaves with a kiss to her cheek and passes a woman with dark hair and bright blue eyes on his way, one who looks familiar and makes him uneasy but doesn’t do more than nod at him with an ironic smile before she disappears into the place he left.
Freya finds him before he has the chance to wander. “There’s someone else I want you to see, and she can’t come to you yet. She’s very ill, yet. Not everyone’s transitions here are easy. We all have poisons to purge ourselves of.”
When he follows her through another door, Arthur isn’t surprised to find Morgana on the bed, shifting restlessly, hair fanned and tangled on the pillow. She’s asleep, or unconscious, in the seaside room Freya seems fond of for convalescents. “Another person I am to learn to forgive? Must I forgive Mordred as well, for wielding the sword that killed me?”
“When you are ready, and when they make amends-and when you do the same for them. There are two sides to every story, you know that. You’ve learned it.” She pauses and soothes her hand over Morgana’s brow. “She calls out for you in her sleep, sometimes.”
“Calling for my head, I suppose?”
“Calling out for comfort.” Freya shrugs. “You are her brother, after all. It’s up to the two of you whether that means less or more than the fact that you’re enemies. Now come along, Morgause will want to get back to tending her and I’m not sure you want to see her yet.”
*
Arthur is left to his own devices more after that, to have long conversations with everyone and learn what he doesn’t know about the story of his own life. He reconciles with Lancelot, assures Elyan that his sister is queen of Camelot and undoubtedly doing a better job than Arthur ever would have done without her, and has a short, awkward conversation with Gwaine about Merlin, apologies and grief that neither of them mentions afterwards. He trains with his knights, more for play than for real. He spends meals with his mother and Freya and, as time goes on and he loses his wariness and tries for truces, if not forgiveness on either side, Nimueh and Morgause.
Morgana, when she finally comes out of her rooms, is quiet and pale, reminding Arthur of how she was before she disappeared from Camelot that first time. She looks at him like he’s a ghost and he wonders what his own face gives away when he meets her eyes, but neither of them is ready for a reconciliation yet. Arthur reminds himself that in the end they will have the time they need. Freya assures him of that.
Sometimes the grief for those he has lost strikes him seemingly out of nowhere-Arthur may be the one dead, but he has lost friends as thoroughly as they have lost him. He may (he wishes and hopes even as he prays it won’t be any time soon) have Gwen again, and Leon and Percival and even Gaius, but he longs for Merlin too, to hear the truth and learn more of magic and forgive him all over again when he will be there to act on his forgiveness this time. Merlin, though, is on a path different from his, and they’ll be separated across lifetimes, maybe centuries somehow.
Freya finds him once when the grief is at its worst and leads him wordlessly to a door that he thought led nowhere. “When I show you this,” she warns him, “you will be tempted never to leave it. It is that way with all of us at first-your mother was the first here, but I was given care of Avalon because she wasted away years here, watching you and your father. It took Nimueh to draw her away and care for her to stop it.”
“Watching-we can see the world?” It takes everything Arthur has not to push Freya aside to get through the door. Instead, he waits the few seconds before Freya nods at whatever she sees in his face and pushes the door open.
It doesn’t open into someone else’s personal vision, but, for once, into a room that looks as though it is part of the stone structure that stands on the isle of Avalon. There’s little in it, not even a chair, but there is a window, and that’s where Freya leads him. “Think of who you wish to see and looks outside,” she says, taking hold of his hand.
His first thought is of some way of seeing that his kingdom is whole and thriving, his second of seeing Gwen, but he has faith in the latter to take care of the former, and in Leon and Percival to take care of Gwen. Merlin, without himself or Gwaine, he is more worried about, so it’s Merlin’s face he calls to mind.
Freya lets out a soft noise when the mist outside the window clears to show Merlin, and Arthur lets her have her privacy. He doesn’t need to know what history she has with Merlin, let alone what feeling, so instead he looks his fill. Merlin looks sad and worn, a few unfamiliar lines in his face-has it been so long since Arthur’s death? His hair isn’t yet grey, but he does look older. He is sitting at the lakeshore, feet in the water and boots next to him, and he’s idly doing something with his hands (braiding grass, it appears) as he looks out over the water.
“Merlin,” Arthur says, uselessly, and reaches out as if to touch him, cuff his shoulder and jolly him into a better mood as he did so many times.
Merlin, where he sits, startles and looks up, his eyes seeming to meet Arthur’s for just one hopeful, breathless second before the mist rises up in front of the window again. Freya lets out a low, sad sound, and Arthur holds her hand so tight he worries he’s hurting for her, never taking his eyes away from the window. He can see why his mother spent years entranced by it, and is already warning himself away from it, warning himself that watching Merlin, Gwen and Camelot is not his task.
It means a great deal, though, to believe at least that he will see them again. He’s willing to believe in destiny, if that’s what it means.