Ok, now this is just getting ridiculous. I feel vaguely embarrassed: more Merlin fic.
Title: Five Conversations Merlin and Arthur Could Have Had (fisher'verse)
Fandom: Merlin
Pairing: Gen
Rating: PG-13ish for language
Warnings: No spoilers, Modern AU
Word Count: ~2400
Disclaimer: So, so, so much not mine. Well, Merlin isn't, that's the BBC's. The original story before the name changes, though, that's mine.
Timeline: Post Cyborg, just after ARRIVALS and Meanwhile, Back on the Boat...
Summary: That 2 hour drive from the airport to Merlin's place is probably gonna be pretty awkward...
Five Conversations
1
“Let me get this straight-”
“Oh, ha ha, very funny,” Merlin interrupted.
“You know what I mean,” Arthur glared at him before turning his attention back to the road, knuckles whitening on the steering wheel. “You graduate first in your class with your Bachelor’s, get full funding and your pick of advisors for your Master’s, and when Nobel Prize winners start fighting over you for who’s gonna be your mentor or whatever for your Ph.D. you decide to chuck it all and go fucking fishing?”
Merlin sighed and leaned his head against the passenger side window, staring out at the shrubbery whipping past on the side of the road. The condensation on the glass feels good against his flushed face, but at least it’s dark enough out that Arthur can’t see his blush. “Nominees, not winners. Anyways, math’s gorgeous, and exciting, and yeah, sometimes I feel like I can describe the whole world with it if I keep going long enough… But fishing makes me feel alive. In a way I can’t describe. It’s like I didn’t really exist until that first time out, you know? And fishing’s a young man’s game. Math’ll still be there when I’m too worn out to fish anymore, and…” Merlin trailed off, uncertain of how to make Arthur understand.
Arthur let the silence grow for a few minutes before he finally broke it. “Like being a part of a giant family, with brothers and sisters all over the world who you’ve never even met, but who you know will jump in front of a bullet for you anyway,” he finally said quietly, the ache of loss clear in his voice.
Merlin aborted the instinctive movement to rest a hand on Arthur’s shoulder as soon as his hand twitched. They weren’t alright enough for that, not yet. But maybe they’d get there. “Yeah,” he agreed quietly instead. “But I didn’t have a clue how I felt about fishing until after I-” he stopped himself. He wasn’t Arthur’s life coach. “So, Morgana said you were going back to school? What for?”
“Yeah,” Arthur shot a wry glance Merlin’s way, “Physiotherapy.”
“You’re going to be a physical therapist?” Merlin tried not to anything color his tone. If there was anything he’d remembered about Arthur, it was that disbelief prompted aggression. And the thought of a one legged physical therapist definitely inspired a little disbelief in Merlin.
Arthur just laughed, the sound bright and free, never taking his eyes off the road ahead of them.
2
“So, Morgana told me you have a boyfriend,” Arthur announced awkwardly.
Merlin shifted in the passenger side seat of Arthur’s truck, turning to stare at him incredulously. “Sorry, what?”
“Um. I mean, how’s that going for you?” Arthur stared at the red light in front of them, desperately wishing for it to change. At least if they were moving he’d have a valid excuse not to look at Merlin, unlike now. He could feel Merlin’s eyes boring through the side of his skull, but chickened out and didn’t look over and meet his eyes.
“How is having a boyfriend working out for me?” Merlin repeated Arthur’s question.
“Sure?” Arthur shrugged helplessly.
“Not well, considering we broke up last year,” Merlin snorted. Arthur’s ears flamed. Awkward. “He wasn’t a fan of the fishing thing, and I wasn’t a fan of the sleeping around thing.”
Arthur felt a surge of unreasoning rage rush through him, and turned to meet Merlin’s eyes steadily. “Do you want to take out a hit on him?” he asked seriously. “I know some people. Or I could knock him around some for you if you want.”
Merlin’s eyes narrowed and he started to say something, but then he paused for no reason Arthur could make out and the corner of his mouth started twitching upwards. “The light’s green.”
Arthur started, looked back at the road, and accelerated jerkily. The clutch always had given him trouble if it wasn’t babied.
“So, is this that support thing I’ve heard so much about, you threatening to off the guys who’ve hurt me?” Merlin asked teasingly, a tone Arthur hadn’t heard from him in far too long.
Arthur jerked his shoulder towards his ears in an aborted shrug before wondering if maybe owning this could help fix things. His “Yes?” ended on a questioning upswing despite himself.
Merlin snorted out a ridiculous sounding laugh and slugged him on the shoulder, hard enough that Arthur knew he was gonna have a bruise there tomorrow. “No, I don’t want you to ‘take out’ my exes, and I can beat up people on my own now if I wanted to.” Arthur glanced over and saw Merlin looking at him again, and when he looked back out at the road Merlin said softly, “But, you know, thanks.”
3
“What did you mean, earlier, when you said that you had a giant crush on me back in high school?” Arthur didn’t take his eyes off the road, his tone an odd combination of tight and offhand.
“I what? I never said that. I didn’t,” Merlin protested, but the sick feeling in his gut let him know his mouth had probably run away with him again during one of those periods at the airport he couldn’t quite remember even now, only fifteen minutes later, as the Vicodin started to wear off.
“You kinda did,” Arthur didn’t elaborate further.
“God,” Merlin reached up to tug at his hair with the hand not trapped in the sling Arthur had bullied him into as soon as he found out about Merlin’s recently dislocated shoulder. “Probably just what it sounded like,” he sighed, defeated, after Arthur’s continued silence spurred him into saying something. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to get my gay all over you. It was just a high school crush, because you were the first person who seemed to accept me for who I was, and you were nice to me. I know better now,” he finished bitterly.
Arthur’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel, and the muscles in his jaw stood out briefly as he clenched his jaw. “What do you mean, you know better now?”
“Well, obviously,” Merlin coughed out a harsh laugh that felt like it was ripping up his throat on the way out, “I mean, seriously Arthur. If you’d liked me for who I was you wouldn’t have asked me to just not be gay to make your life easier, would you’ve?”
Startled, Arthur turned to face Merlin full on. “What? But I-”
“Eyes on the road, eyes on the road!” Merlin interrupted him as a pair of glowing yellow eyes shone through the scrubby trees on the side of the road. It would be just his luck to get killed in a deer-on-car collision after making it through a whole salmon season mostly intact (the more dangerous seasons, like king crab or cod or opie or even halibut, he always came out of without a scratch. Salmon, though, obviously had it out for him. Every single season, so far. At least he hadn’t broken any bones this year).
Arthur whipped back around and jerked the wheel to detour safely around the idiot deer who’d decided that now was a great time to bound into the middle of the road.
A minute later, after Merlin’s heart had slowed back down to a normal rhythm, Arthur started to say something. Merlin didn’t let him get enough of the first word out to even guess at what it was going to be before he spoke over him, “Tolerance isn’t the same as acceptance, Arthur. Just leave it. I don’t want to talk about it. And it’s not like we need to, anyway-it’s not like we’re going to hang out of our own free will, right?”
The muscle in Arthur’s jaw jumped again, and he looked like he wanted to punch something. Merlin didn’t let himself shrink against the passenger side door like he wanted to. The rest of the trip to Merlin’s house was completed in stony silence. Arthur didn’t slam on the brakes in front of Merlin’s driveway like Merlin had thought he would, and even got out and carried Merlin’s stuff up to the front porch for him.
As Arthur was going back down the porch stairs, he paused on the bottom step, still facing away from Merlin (who was fumbling to pick out the front door key from his overburdened key ring with only one hand-he didn’t even know what half those keys were even for). “I’ll pick you up tomorrow. Eight.”
Merlin dropped his keys, and turned to stare at the back of Arthur’s head. His mouth opened, but he couldn’t get any sound to come out of it.
“We’re going to get drunk off our asses and work this shit out. You’re still my best friend, dumbass, and you’re always gonna be, like it or not. So if you need to beat some sense into me about something, you better get ready to do it, because family don’t end that easy.” With that dramatic announcement, Arthur practically ran back down the driveway to his truck and drove off (without the fitting squeal of tires Merlin was expecting).
Merlin stared after him in shock. “What the fuck?” he asked the darkness around him. It didn’t answer.
4
“By the way,” Arthur blurted nonsensically into the silence filling the truck’s cab (because really, what was he even segueing from?), “I’m gay too.”
Merlin sighed. He’d almost been expecting this. Morgana’d gotten her psych degree and a lucrative practice, and always had been adept at brainwashing, after all. “Let me guess, you’re desperately in love with me and all the mean things you’ve ever done were a result of internalized homophobia and now that you’ve embraced yourself you want to run away to Canada to get gay-married and adopt lots of Asian babies with me?”
“Uh,” Arthur fumbled.
“Oh, and the fact you’re not physically attracted to me would be because of some deep-seated abandonment issues or something that you’ll be able to work through with therapy until we can finally have a healthy and loving physical as well as emotional relationship?” Merlin rolled his eyes.
“It’s like you’re in my head,” Arthur whispered under his breath, eyes wide and fixed on Merlin. Luckily they were at the only stoplight in town.
“Yeah, no.” Merlin didn’t have to force the laugh. “You’re vulnerable and’ve got a deluded, matchmaking psychologist of a cousin as the person you look up to the most. You’re straight, Arthur, and as for the rest, well,” Merlin’s mouth twisted as he tried, and failed, to suppress a fond smile. “You’re just a dick. Deal with it. The rest of us certainly have to.”
Arthur’s laugh seemed surprised out of him.
5
“You know how they say your life flashes before your eyes right before you’re gonna die?” Arthur’s question was abrupt and flat, and shattered the uneasy silence they’d marinated in through most of the drive. “Mine did,” Arthur continued without giving Merlin time to reply, “after the explosion; all the things I wanted to fix, and knew I was never gonna be able to.”
Merlin opened his mouth to reply but couldn’t find the words, and instead managed to gape like a gasping fish, flopping on the deck, suffocating to death in a medium full of oxygen his body couldn’t process. Somewhere in the back of his mind he spared a wistful wish for the ability to smack the part of his brain that insisted on overblown fishing metaphors for everything, but most of him was flummoxed by Arthur’s random decision that it was now Sharing Time.
“I thought I was gonna die, and the thing that sucked the worst about it was that you hated me and I’d never even tried to fix it.”
“I don’t hate you,” Merlin hadn’t realized he was even going to say anything until after he’d already said it. He couldn’t blame this one on the Independent Republic of His Mouth, though, because. Well. It wouldn’t be as hard to keep talking if he wasn’t in control. “I never hated you, Arthur. You just- God,” he interrupted himself, pounding a fist on his thigh to distract himself from the burning in his eyes. “I trusted you. And you just turned around and asked me to be someone else. Jesus, man,” he gulped for breath and tried to even out his erratic heartbeat with pure willpower. “Almost worse than, than when that drunk hit my parents,” he muttered under his breath. The radio wasn’t on, though, and he could tell Arthur had heard him when the blinker clicked on and they skidded to a stop on the graveled shoulder of the road.
“We just- I can’t-” Arthur pounded the steering wheel, once, and turned to grab Merlin in a rough hug. Merlin let out a pained cry and Arthur let go like he was on fire.
“Dislocated shoulder,” Merlin got out, wheezing through the pain. So, that Vicodin had definitely worn off, then.
“Where the hell is your sling, then?” Arthur sounded furious. Merlin didn’t know why.
“In my backpack,” Merlin answered after the fire had re-centralized in his shoulder, as opposed to spreading out through his entire body like it did when his shoulder got jarred.
“Hell of a lot of good it’s doing you there.” Arthur grabbed Merlin’s bag from the backseat of the cab and rummaged through it until he found the sling, and then bullied him into it. He’d found the pills, too, and made Merlin take one with a sip of lukewarm coffee from a forgotten cup languishing in the driver’s side cup holder.
They sat in silence for a few minutes before Arthur flipped his blinker back on (a wholly unnecessary precaution on the empty highway, but then, that was Arthur) and pulled back onto the road. Merlin started to drift in the thick silence as a combination of exhaustion and the Vicodin taking effect joined forces against him, but they were at his and Uncle Gaius’s house before he lost the battle against sleep.
Arthur guided him up the porch and into the house, unlocking the door with Merlin’s keys, putting Merlin’s stuff in the kitchen and taking Merlin as far as his own room and settling him in on his bed. Merlin was asleep before his head hit the pillow.
When he woke up the next morning, there was a note on his bedside table. You’re my big regret. We’re fixing this, it said in Arthur’s chicken-scratch handwriting which only years of practice let Merlin decipher. It made him smile, even though he tried to fight it. Arthur always had been a force of nature.
Fandom: Merlin
Pairing: Gen
Rating: PG-13ish for language
Warnings: No spoilers, Modern AU
Word Count: ~2400
Disclaimer: So, so, so much not mine. Well, Merlin isn't, that's the BBC's. The original story before the name changes, though, that's mine.
Timeline: Post Cyborg, just after ARRIVALS and Meanwhile, Back on the Boat...
Summary: That 2 hour drive from the airport to Merlin's place is probably gonna be pretty awkward...
Five Conversations
1
“Let me get this straight-”
“Oh, ha ha, very funny,” Merlin interrupted.
“You know what I mean,” Arthur glared at him before turning his attention back to the road, knuckles whitening on the steering wheel. “You graduate first in your class with your Bachelor’s, get full funding and your pick of advisors for your Master’s, and when Nobel Prize winners start fighting over you for who’s gonna be your mentor or whatever for your Ph.D. you decide to chuck it all and go fucking fishing?”
Merlin sighed and leaned his head against the passenger side window, staring out at the shrubbery whipping past on the side of the road. The condensation on the glass feels good against his flushed face, but at least it’s dark enough out that Arthur can’t see his blush. “Nominees, not winners. Anyways, math’s gorgeous, and exciting, and yeah, sometimes I feel like I can describe the whole world with it if I keep going long enough… But fishing makes me feel alive. In a way I can’t describe. It’s like I didn’t really exist until that first time out, you know? And fishing’s a young man’s game. Math’ll still be there when I’m too worn out to fish anymore, and…” Merlin trailed off, uncertain of how to make Arthur understand.
Arthur let the silence grow for a few minutes before he finally broke it. “Like being a part of a giant family, with brothers and sisters all over the world who you’ve never even met, but who you know will jump in front of a bullet for you anyway,” he finally said quietly, the ache of loss clear in his voice.
Merlin aborted the instinctive movement to rest a hand on Arthur’s shoulder as soon as his hand twitched. They weren’t alright enough for that, not yet. But maybe they’d get there. “Yeah,” he agreed quietly instead. “But I didn’t have a clue how I felt about fishing until after I-” he stopped himself. He wasn’t Arthur’s life coach. “So, Morgana said you were going back to school? What for?”
“Yeah,” Arthur shot a wry glance Merlin’s way, “Physiotherapy.”
“You’re going to be a physical therapist?” Merlin tried not to anything color his tone. If there was anything he’d remembered about Arthur, it was that disbelief prompted aggression. And the thought of a one legged physical therapist definitely inspired a little disbelief in Merlin.
Arthur just laughed, the sound bright and free, never taking his eyes off the road ahead of them.
2
“So, Morgana told me you have a boyfriend,” Arthur announced awkwardly.
Merlin shifted in the passenger side seat of Arthur’s truck, turning to stare at him incredulously. “Sorry, what?”
“Um. I mean, how’s that going for you?” Arthur stared at the red light in front of them, desperately wishing for it to change. At least if they were moving he’d have a valid excuse not to look at Merlin, unlike now. He could feel Merlin’s eyes boring through the side of his skull, but chickened out and didn’t look over and meet his eyes.
“How is having a boyfriend working out for me?” Merlin repeated Arthur’s question.
“Sure?” Arthur shrugged helplessly.
“Not well, considering we broke up last year,” Merlin snorted. Arthur’s ears flamed. Awkward. “He wasn’t a fan of the fishing thing, and I wasn’t a fan of the sleeping around thing.”
Arthur felt a surge of unreasoning rage rush through him, and turned to meet Merlin’s eyes steadily. “Do you want to take out a hit on him?” he asked seriously. “I know some people. Or I could knock him around some for you if you want.”
Merlin’s eyes narrowed and he started to say something, but then he paused for no reason Arthur could make out and the corner of his mouth started twitching upwards. “The light’s green.”
Arthur started, looked back at the road, and accelerated jerkily. The clutch always had given him trouble if it wasn’t babied.
“So, is this that support thing I’ve heard so much about, you threatening to off the guys who’ve hurt me?” Merlin asked teasingly, a tone Arthur hadn’t heard from him in far too long.
Arthur jerked his shoulder towards his ears in an aborted shrug before wondering if maybe owning this could help fix things. His “Yes?” ended on a questioning upswing despite himself.
Merlin snorted out a ridiculous sounding laugh and slugged him on the shoulder, hard enough that Arthur knew he was gonna have a bruise there tomorrow. “No, I don’t want you to ‘take out’ my exes, and I can beat up people on my own now if I wanted to.” Arthur glanced over and saw Merlin looking at him again, and when he looked back out at the road Merlin said softly, “But, you know, thanks.”
3
“What did you mean, earlier, when you said that you had a giant crush on me back in high school?” Arthur didn’t take his eyes off the road, his tone an odd combination of tight and offhand.
“I what? I never said that. I didn’t,” Merlin protested, but the sick feeling in his gut let him know his mouth had probably run away with him again during one of those periods at the airport he couldn’t quite remember even now, only fifteen minutes later, as the Vicodin started to wear off.
“You kinda did,” Arthur didn’t elaborate further.
“God,” Merlin reached up to tug at his hair with the hand not trapped in the sling Arthur had bullied him into as soon as he found out about Merlin’s recently dislocated shoulder. “Probably just what it sounded like,” he sighed, defeated, after Arthur’s continued silence spurred him into saying something. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to get my gay all over you. It was just a high school crush, because you were the first person who seemed to accept me for who I was, and you were nice to me. I know better now,” he finished bitterly.
Arthur’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel, and the muscles in his jaw stood out briefly as he clenched his jaw. “What do you mean, you know better now?”
“Well, obviously,” Merlin coughed out a harsh laugh that felt like it was ripping up his throat on the way out, “I mean, seriously Arthur. If you’d liked me for who I was you wouldn’t have asked me to just not be gay to make your life easier, would you’ve?”
Startled, Arthur turned to face Merlin full on. “What? But I-”
“Eyes on the road, eyes on the road!” Merlin interrupted him as a pair of glowing yellow eyes shone through the scrubby trees on the side of the road. It would be just his luck to get killed in a deer-on-car collision after making it through a whole salmon season mostly intact (the more dangerous seasons, like king crab or cod or opie or even halibut, he always came out of without a scratch. Salmon, though, obviously had it out for him. Every single season, so far. At least he hadn’t broken any bones this year).
Arthur whipped back around and jerked the wheel to detour safely around the idiot deer who’d decided that now was a great time to bound into the middle of the road.
A minute later, after Merlin’s heart had slowed back down to a normal rhythm, Arthur started to say something. Merlin didn’t let him get enough of the first word out to even guess at what it was going to be before he spoke over him, “Tolerance isn’t the same as acceptance, Arthur. Just leave it. I don’t want to talk about it. And it’s not like we need to, anyway-it’s not like we’re going to hang out of our own free will, right?”
The muscle in Arthur’s jaw jumped again, and he looked like he wanted to punch something. Merlin didn’t let himself shrink against the passenger side door like he wanted to. The rest of the trip to Merlin’s house was completed in stony silence. Arthur didn’t slam on the brakes in front of Merlin’s driveway like Merlin had thought he would, and even got out and carried Merlin’s stuff up to the front porch for him.
As Arthur was going back down the porch stairs, he paused on the bottom step, still facing away from Merlin (who was fumbling to pick out the front door key from his overburdened key ring with only one hand-he didn’t even know what half those keys were even for). “I’ll pick you up tomorrow. Eight.”
Merlin dropped his keys, and turned to stare at the back of Arthur’s head. His mouth opened, but he couldn’t get any sound to come out of it.
“We’re going to get drunk off our asses and work this shit out. You’re still my best friend, dumbass, and you’re always gonna be, like it or not. So if you need to beat some sense into me about something, you better get ready to do it, because family don’t end that easy.” With that dramatic announcement, Arthur practically ran back down the driveway to his truck and drove off (without the fitting squeal of tires Merlin was expecting).
Merlin stared after him in shock. “What the fuck?” he asked the darkness around him. It didn’t answer.
4
“By the way,” Arthur blurted nonsensically into the silence filling the truck’s cab (because really, what was he even segueing from?), “I’m gay too.”
Merlin sighed. He’d almost been expecting this. Morgana’d gotten her psych degree and a lucrative practice, and always had been adept at brainwashing, after all. “Let me guess, you’re desperately in love with me and all the mean things you’ve ever done were a result of internalized homophobia and now that you’ve embraced yourself you want to run away to Canada to get gay-married and adopt lots of Asian babies with me?”
“Uh,” Arthur fumbled.
“Oh, and the fact you’re not physically attracted to me would be because of some deep-seated abandonment issues or something that you’ll be able to work through with therapy until we can finally have a healthy and loving physical as well as emotional relationship?” Merlin rolled his eyes.
“It’s like you’re in my head,” Arthur whispered under his breath, eyes wide and fixed on Merlin. Luckily they were at the only stoplight in town.
“Yeah, no.” Merlin didn’t have to force the laugh. “You’re vulnerable and’ve got a deluded, matchmaking psychologist of a cousin as the person you look up to the most. You’re straight, Arthur, and as for the rest, well,” Merlin’s mouth twisted as he tried, and failed, to suppress a fond smile. “You’re just a dick. Deal with it. The rest of us certainly have to.”
Arthur’s laugh seemed surprised out of him.
5
“You know how they say your life flashes before your eyes right before you’re gonna die?” Arthur’s question was abrupt and flat, and shattered the uneasy silence they’d marinated in through most of the drive. “Mine did,” Arthur continued without giving Merlin time to reply, “after the explosion; all the things I wanted to fix, and knew I was never gonna be able to.”
Merlin opened his mouth to reply but couldn’t find the words, and instead managed to gape like a gasping fish, flopping on the deck, suffocating to death in a medium full of oxygen his body couldn’t process. Somewhere in the back of his mind he spared a wistful wish for the ability to smack the part of his brain that insisted on overblown fishing metaphors for everything, but most of him was flummoxed by Arthur’s random decision that it was now Sharing Time.
“I thought I was gonna die, and the thing that sucked the worst about it was that you hated me and I’d never even tried to fix it.”
“I don’t hate you,” Merlin hadn’t realized he was even going to say anything until after he’d already said it. He couldn’t blame this one on the Independent Republic of His Mouth, though, because. Well. It wouldn’t be as hard to keep talking if he wasn’t in control. “I never hated you, Arthur. You just- God,” he interrupted himself, pounding a fist on his thigh to distract himself from the burning in his eyes. “I trusted you. And you just turned around and asked me to be someone else. Jesus, man,” he gulped for breath and tried to even out his erratic heartbeat with pure willpower. “Almost worse than, than when that drunk hit my parents,” he muttered under his breath. The radio wasn’t on, though, and he could tell Arthur had heard him when the blinker clicked on and they skidded to a stop on the graveled shoulder of the road.
“We just- I can’t-” Arthur pounded the steering wheel, once, and turned to grab Merlin in a rough hug. Merlin let out a pained cry and Arthur let go like he was on fire.
“Dislocated shoulder,” Merlin got out, wheezing through the pain. So, that Vicodin had definitely worn off, then.
“Where the hell is your sling, then?” Arthur sounded furious. Merlin didn’t know why.
“In my backpack,” Merlin answered after the fire had re-centralized in his shoulder, as opposed to spreading out through his entire body like it did when his shoulder got jarred.
“Hell of a lot of good it’s doing you there.” Arthur grabbed Merlin’s bag from the backseat of the cab and rummaged through it until he found the sling, and then bullied him into it. He’d found the pills, too, and made Merlin take one with a sip of lukewarm coffee from a forgotten cup languishing in the driver’s side cup holder.
They sat in silence for a few minutes before Arthur flipped his blinker back on (a wholly unnecessary precaution on the empty highway, but then, that was Arthur) and pulled back onto the road. Merlin started to drift in the thick silence as a combination of exhaustion and the Vicodin taking effect joined forces against him, but they were at his and Uncle Gaius’s house before he lost the battle against sleep.
Arthur guided him up the porch and into the house, unlocking the door with Merlin’s keys, putting Merlin’s stuff in the kitchen and taking Merlin as far as his own room and settling him in on his bed. Merlin was asleep before his head hit the pillow.
When he woke up the next morning, there was a note on his bedside table. You’re my big regret. We’re fixing this, it said in Arthur’s chicken-scratch handwriting which only years of practice let Merlin decipher. It made him smile, even though he tried to fight it. Arthur always had been a force of nature.