Fic: Masked Part III (a)
III.
“Are you sure about this?” Freya asks nervously, fingering the necklace around her neck. They are at the top of Mt. Camlann, the sky dark above them, dotted with stars and a sliver of the moon.
“Absolutely,” Merlin replies confidently. He smiles at her. “You can do this, Freya. I know you can.”
Three months have transformed the woman in front of him--she is no longer painfully thin, her hair falling in silky waves to her shoulders, and she smiles more easily; more than that, she is strong, confident, and, as he has come to learn, stubborn as anything. She’s not completely healed yet--he knows she still has nightmares, hears them through the wall when he comes home to visit, and sometimes she flinches if he or Will move too quickly in an unexpected way, and sometimes she’ll get a far away look in her eyes, remembering something, but she is getting better.
And he has absolute faith in her. Which is why they’re out here in the first place.
“You can do it, Frey,” he says again, but she still looks dubious. “Look, if things go wrong, I’ll have the necklace, and Arc is right here. Between the two of us we can subdue you and get the necklace back on. I’m not called Warlock for nothing, you know.”
“You’re not funny,” she remarks almost absently, and he marks that as a sign that she’s been spending too much time with Will. She lets out a rush of breath and nods to him. “Alright, I’m ready.”
He steps up to her, squeezes her shoulder, and cuts through the metal with a quick spell. It falls from her neck into his open palm and he quickly steps back out of range, watching her for signs that it is going wrong. He sees her body tremble, her hands tighten into fists as the beast tries to rise inside of her and she struggles to press it down. Her eyes are a steady gold, burning bright, and though her figure shakes and convulses, it holds its form. She stays human, her skin pink and her hair dark, and after a long moment her body goes completely rigid and her knees give out beneath her. He starts towards her, but then her head swings up and he looks into her brown eyes.
Brown. Not gold.
“Any time now, Merlin,” she grits out, panting. He raises his hands and speaks four words, the syllables twisting out of him; at first it looks like nothing happens, but then a circle of gold appears in the air around Freya, spinning before settling on her skin like dust and sinking in.
The tension bleeds out of her and she pitches forward, catching herself with her hands and then sitting back on her knees. She holds her arms out in front of her, staring at them, and then looks up at him. “It worked,” she says, stunned, and then it gives way into a long, only slightly hysterical laugh. “Oh my god, Merlin, it worked!” He approaches her, helping her climb to her feet, and then she jumps into his arms, hugging him fiercely. “It worked, it worked, it worked!” she sings.
“Told you it would,” he says, smug.
She taps him lightly on the back of his head, and maybe she’s been spending too much time with his mum as well. “No stupid metal collar. Just me!” she laughs again.
“You’ll have to learn how to control it,” he says, but he can’t keep the grin off his face. She pokes him firmly in the ribs, mock scowling at him.
“Stop raining on my victory, Warlock.” She tries to do a victory jig but her knees buckle and he has to catch her to keep from falling.
“Let’s get you home,” he says with a laugh, “before you collapse again. Victory isn’t very victorious if you’re covered in dirt.”
“Shush you,” she says, but allows him to help her onto Arc’s back, and she leans against his back as they fly back to Hunith’s house. By the time they land in the back garden she is half-asleep and he has to practically carry her in, up the stairs and into the bedroom that now belongs to her. “Thank you, Merlin,” she murmurs sleepily as she crawls into her bed.
“Always, Frey,” he tells her softly, kissing her on the forehead and leaving her to sleep.
+
“Morgana is being weird,” Arthur says sullenly three days later. Merlin is right in the middle of writing an email to some prick from the 12th floor who is too lazy to come up and say to his face that he thinks a report was done wrong, and he’s trying to figure out how to word it so that he can convey that the man is a tosser without resorting to Arthur’s level and outright saying it.
“Mmm?” is what he says in response to Arthur, and gets a glare in response.
“She’s being weird,” Arthur complains again, and then throws a crumpled up piece of paper at his head when he doesn’t respond properly to it.
Merlin’s response is to throw a paperclip back. It misses completely, but at least it distracts him from his former topic of conversation and has him ranting about you could have put my eye out Merlin and I could sue you for incompetence and so on, all of which he tunes out with the ease of practice.
He doesn’t think any further on Arthur’s declaration of Morgana’s odd behavior until he sees Gwen looking harried the next morning. He pauses in front of her desk and she looks up at him, her expression frustrated and a bit confused and actually upset. “Gwen?” he asks. “What’s wrong?”
She shoves a piece of paper away from her. “Morgana canceled all of her meetings for today, and then she just disappeared and I have no idea where she is and this guy from Mercia keeps calling and yelling and we’re supposed to have the report on Cameliard’s progress by this afternoon but I don’t even know where it is and--”
He crosses around to the other side of the desk and puts a hand on her shoulder, spinning her in her chair so that she faces him. “Gwen, calm down. Take a breath. The next time Mercia calls just put him through to Arthur--he’ll take care of it. You and Leon try to find the report on Cameliard, and I’ll see if I can track down Morgana, okay?”
She takes the deep breath that he suggests and nods. “Alright. Thank you, Merlin.”
“No problem,” he says. “Just relax. Now, what did Morgana tell you before she took off? Was she ill?”
“No, I don’t think so. She’s been...off. Distracted, irritable--more irritable--taking lots of phone calls from a number I didn’t recognize. She’s just been odd lately. I’ve tried asking her what’s wrong, but she refuses to say.”
“I’ll find her,” he promises. “Maybe she’s just having an off-week. It happens to the best of us.”
Gwen nods. “Maybe,” she says, but doesn’t sound convinced by it. She heads off to grab Leon and he heads in the opposite direction, stopping in to fill Arthur in.
“I’ll handle Mercia,” Arthur says once he finishes, a gleam in his eye that usually means someone cries and lawyers get called. Merlin rolls his eyes and lets it go, because it’s been about a month and a half since his boss made someone cry, and it’s just a matter of time. “But I told you Morgana was being weird.”
“Fine, you were right. For once.”
Arthur gives him a smug smile. “You should learn to listen to me, Merlin. You might learn something.”
“All I do is listen to you. I just happen to ignore most of it. Do you have any idea of where she might be?”
“How would I know?”
Merlin raises an eyebrow at him. “I dunno, you’re her brother?”
Arthur tilts his head in a way that says yes, I suppose I am and then drums his fingers on the top of his desk. “Try the roof,” he says after a minute. “That’s where we used to go when we escaped from our nannies. And then from our tutors. And from banquets. And from family dinners, come to think of it.”
“I knew you were a hellion as a child,” Merlin says, and doesn’t linger over the fact that his favorite place to escape to is also the roof. Arthur gives him a who me? smile and he shakes his head as he leaves the room.
Sure enough, Morgana is on the roof. She is standing close enough to the edge that it would make Merlin nervous if he didn’t have magical powers and was capable of (brief) flight. Her hair has been let loose, although he’s sure it was up when he saw her earlier, and she has a lit cigarette between her fingers, smoke curling in tendrils around her.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” he says.
“Only when I don’t know what else to do,” she says without turning around. “Arthur does too. There’s a pack in his left bottom drawer, in the removable bottom. Lighter too. It has a dragon on it. Family pride, you know.” There’s something so bitter in her voice that it makes him recoil, and he wonders what he’s seeing right now.
He avoids the question for just a moment. “How did you get up here?”
“I have a key, Merlin,” she says, in one of her you’re an idiot tones. She and Arthur are scarily alike in the similarity of those voices. “I am second in line for the company, after all.”
He shoves his hands into his pockets, staring at her back. He’s not sure what’s going on, but it doesn’t feel right to ask Morgana if she’s okay. She’s operating on a different level right now, one that platitudes, even genuine ones, will fall short of. He’s struggling to figure out what to say when she turns to look at him, the color of her eyes more translucent than usual, maybe because of the lighting, maybe because of something he doesn’t know and doesn’t understand. “Have you ever wondered, Merlin, if your whole has been a lie? If everything you thought you knew was just one fabrication after another? If the people who claimed to love you were just lying, straight to your face?”
He thinks guiltily of the things he knows about her that she can’t know about herself, about the way her mother died, and the parts that her own aunt, and Uther, and even Arthur unwittingly played in it. He thinks about the way that half of his life is a lie, because it doesn’t matter if magic is illegal and he’s only keeping it secret to protect himself (and to protect his friends and family from the enemies he makes as Warlock), it’s still a lie to sit here and pretend that he is normal every day. He thinks about secrets, and the way they press down, and he has become so accustomed to their presence that he sometimes forgets their weight. In the end, he doesn’t say anything, because he doesn’t have an answer for Morgana, not the right one to answer the real question she’s asking, the one he can’t make out.
Her expression closes and she takes a long drag of her cigarette, then crushes it beneath her foot. “Stupid, right?” she says, and takes it all back. “Gwen must be frantic.” She turns and walks past him, and he’s sure that somewhere along the way he’s missed something absolutely vital.
(Inanely, he thinks of a photograph, of their parents arrayed, smiling, one of them destined to bring destruction to the rest, and he wonders if they ever had a moment like this one, a pivotal point where the paths swung between ruin and safety? And, which did he and Morgana just land on?)
Part III (b)