Fic: The Things He Never Knew 1/2

[rebbeile]

Rating: R (overall)
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Words: 6306 (this part)
Genre: Angst, angst, angst, fluff, angst.
Spoilers: General Season 1/2
Disclaimer: I do not own these boys.
Summary: Where Uther discovers Merlin's magic and Arthur isn't around to save him.
Notes: Unbeta'd. Oh, and did I mention it has angst? And I finished it very early in the morning, so if there are any huge errors feel free to point them out.


Despite how fervently and frequently Arthur called him an idiot, Merlin had never truly believed that he was - until now. He’d always thought that he was clever; the brighter side of the coin; that he could wield magic freely within Camelot and he’d be safe, because it was his destiny to remain so. But now, with the dungeon floor cold beneath his fingers, and the last day he’d ever see dawning bright in the sky above the castle, he had to accept that perhaps, for once, Arthur had been right all along.

There was a sudden noise in the passageway outside his cell and he looked up, frightened, but it was only a guard tapping idly against the wooden table. Merlin leaned uneasily back against the wall, breathing heavily, and his fingers caught against a piece of straw lying on the stone floor. It broke easily, and Merlin closed his eyes, the faint scent reminding him of Ealdor and his mother and the tall, dark forests that he had grown up within. Those forests had always seemed to him to be as magical as he was. They had always seemed comforting - steady and familiar, yet at the same time utterly brand new and strange.

As Merlin rested his head upon the rough stone of the wall, he pretended for a moment that he wasn’t Merlin - that he was no longer a small, fearful warlock bound within the stones of a castle and trapped beneath the wide arc of his destiny, but was instead someone who had no knowledge of Camelot, who had no idea of the cruelty that existed within the world and who had more confidence in the goodness of men than Merlin could ever hope to regain. He longed to drift out of his body and allow whatever part of him remained to sink slowly into that other person, so that he could escape the end that he felt lurking far too close beside him.

It was only later, when he could hear the guards coming down the passage and knew that all of the time he had left was gone, that he realised. Deep down, he hadn’t been pretending to be someone else. Instead, he’d been longing to be the person he had been years ago, when Camelot was a faint shadow in his future and the only destiny he knew of was that which he saw reflected in the fields and in the house he would one day inherit. But he wasn’t that boy anymore; he couldn’t drift out into the air and find him, because he wasn’t there - he was still within Merlin, buried impossibly deep. So Merlin left the memories of him lying safely behind him in the straw, where the world couldn’t take them, and where the final rays of sunlight couldn’t drag them to the surface and burn parts of them away.

He stood and walked out of the cell slowly, flanked by the guards. And as he climbed the stairs and prepared to face the end, he wondered just how, after everything that he’d done, it had come to this.

***

Merlin had always known, deep down, that it was going to happen eventually. That knowledge had hovered over his actions throughout every day he spent in Camelot, restricting him with its presence, driving a sliver of fear straight into the very heart of his life. It was always there - a tiny cloud of a possibility waiting for the moment when it could slot into position in Merlin’s life and become a solid, inescapable reality. There was never any doubt that somehow, someday, one of the castle’s inhabitants would find out about Merlin’s magic. He just hadn’t expected it to be Uther.

It wasn’t that Uther was unobservant. Merlin knew that there had been moments where he’d swerved perilously close to revealing the truth. But those moments had been swift and sudden, and they were over almost before Merlin had even remembered that it was dangerous to let that part of himself shine so blatantly through. Uther had never noticed Merlin’s magic simply because he had never truly noticed Merlin. Although Uther saw magic in every corner of the castle, and suspected sorcery to be the secret concealed at the heart of every being that bent below his gaze, he was subject to the same outlook that had shaped the rule of the Kings of Camelot for hundreds of years. He did not see the subtle power that flowed within the servants of the castle; he did not believe that such a thing could exist.

Merlin had always believed that Arthur would be the one to find out - that they’d be fighting beasts or sorcerers and suddenly Arthur would just see, in a way that he had never seen before, and he’d know that Merlin was not simply Merlin but was also something more. He’d always believed that Arthur would be the first to find out, and he’d always believed that their friendship was limited and defined by that vague, uncertain moment, even if only one of them knew that it was coming. That moment would be the hinge on which their lives - on which their destiny - swung. It would be the moment in which Arthur would discover all of Merlin, everything that he was and everything that he could be; in the same way that Merlin had discovered that Arthur was not just a Prince. It would be the moment in which the very threads of their friendship would be exposed, when Arthur would have to choose between a king and a servant, and between a parent and a friend.

Merlin had always expected Arthur to be the first to know, partly because the dragon told of their paths being entwined, but also because their lives were not separate ones anymore. Arthur and Merlin weren’t separate anymore, because Merlin would not exist in the same way without Arthur. He had calluses on his palms that Arthur’s orders had placed there, and bruises from each of the times Arthur had pushed him around, forgetting that Merlin wasn’t a knight but rather a ‘skinny, stringy, sad excuse for a man’. Arthur had shaped Merlin’s body in tiny ways, until Merlin was as different from the boy he was in Ealdor as Arthur was from his father. Arthur had helped him to grow.

Merlin sometimes felt, at times when he was tired and the end of the day seemed close enough to touch, that he should just tell the prince - just reach inside himself and find all of the words that he never knew how to say, and throw them at Arthur, because he couldn’t bear to keep them locked within himself for any longer.

It would be a relief, he supposed, to have Arthur know the whole of him. Even if Arthur didn’t accept that; even if he dragged Merlin before his father, he would still feel some small sense of release, because Arthur would be judging all of Merlin - the Merlin who could use magic, but also the Merlin who couldn’t hunt properly and who never did anything right and who gave Arthur rat stew and who stood alongside him when all the world had turned away. He supposed that if Arthur judged him to be wrong, and if he believed that despite all that they had done Merlin was still a creature of evil, then Merlin would go to his end with the knowledge that Arthur could see no difference between Merlin and the sorcerers that they had battled. But Arthur knew him the best of anyone, and if he saw no difference, then perhaps one did not truly exist. Perhaps Merlin, too, was evil - the sort of evil to be found in a person who sits by and watches their people die under a misguided king. Perhaps Merlin deserved to die at the King’s command.

But Uther was the one person that Merlin could never have just told. Because no matter how close Merlin got to the king, no matter how many times he stood between his son and death, there would always be a part of him that Uther could not accept. If Uther ever found out then Merlin would cease to be Merlin, and would instead become, in Uther’s eyes, a mere window through which magic flowed, bright and dangerous. Merlin could feel it in the way Uther looked when he stared down at the warlocks lying prostrate before him across the castle floor; he could see it in the way Uther had swept aside his friendship with Gaius because of a few deceptive words. Sorcerers were no longer tied to humanity in Uther’s mind. Anyone associated with magic was magic. Uther did not understand that it was possible to have something so different inside oneself and yet remain the same. He did not understand that there was more to a sorcerer than magic - that the magic was merely a path one chose to walk and did not wholly define the being who walked it.

There might have been a time, when Ygraine was young and alive and Arthur had not yet come into the world, when Uther could see more human than magic in the faces of those sorcerers that he encountered. He might even have talked to them, or laughed with them - he might even have proved that he could interact with them in a way other than that of a King passing sentence over a criminal. But those days were long past - they had faded as Ygraine died, and had crumbled into dust amongst the shadows of Arthur’s youth. Arthur had few memories of them; Merlin had none at all.

So Merlin knew that Uther could never know, and that if the King ever found out then he’d face his end in a manner no different to all the other sorcerers that passed from the dungeon to the courtyard with their arms bound and their heads held high. Merlin had often wondered what they thought of in their final steps, whether they dreamed of casting off their shackles and soaring high above the castle, tearing stone chunks from the walls and hurling them down upon those who dared to believe that they could take life without consequence. Or perhaps they simply thought of home, and all of the people that circled around such a place, weaving the threads of their lives into the sorcerer’s own. Merlin believed that he would think of Arthur - of how Arthur looked, standing above him on the balcony, of how his golden skin glowed in the light and how his eyes sparkled brighter than sapphires as they stared solemnly back into Merlin’s own. He found it was an oddly comforting thought, knowing that he could die with Arthur’s eyes upon him.

Because Merlin found that somehow, in the quiet spaces between cleaning and polishing and tidying each day, he had begun to appreciate Arthur. He was a selfish, royal prat, but he was also one of the best and the bravest men that Merlin had ever met, and beneath all of the insults and the relentless teasing and the orders, Merlin could see that Arthur cared more than a prince should about the lives of his servants. Merlin could see that Arthur cared for him. And he knew, deep within his chest, that that was enough. Merlin didn’t need Arthur to feel the desire that Merlin felt, pulsing thickly through his veins whenever Arthur leant closer to him than he ought to. Merlin didn’t need Arthur to share the love that Merlin felt whenever Arthur stood before his people and proved that he could be their leader as well as their Prince.

Merlin saw the shadow of kingship hanging low over Arthur’s head as clearly as Arthur himself did, and he understood that Arthur’s care was the greatest form of affection he could ever hope to attain from the Prince. The teasing and the insults that had been so sincere when they first met were harmless, now, and Merlin knew that he only continued with them so that he wouldn’t have to remember that Arthur was more than just a man - that even when they stood close enough to touch, Arthur remained beyond the reach of a servant.

***

Arthur had been beyond Merlin’s reach when it had happened. Uther had sent the prince out to examine the outlying villages of the kingdom - a routine patrol that occurred most years. But this year, Gaius had been busy with an outbreak of disease within the castle, and Merlin had been ordered to stay behind and help.
“But Gaius,” he’d protested mournfully, thinking of the experiences he’d be missing out on. Sure, the walking and the rain and the hunting were terrible, but there was also Arthur. Arthur with his blonde head bowed against the wind and his jaw curving beautifully below his rain-wet cheeks; Arthur in the evenings, sitting so imperiously that Merlin could almost have believed that they were back in Camelot and Arthur was on a throne if not for the soft green of the trees arching over their heads and the damp log he could see poking out from beneath Arthur’s body. Arthur watching him carefully when he didn’t think Merlin was looking to make sure that Merlin didn’t fall off his horse (it’d only happened once, but Arthur hadn’t forgotten it), and Arthur tossing the thickest bedroll to Merlin every second night, so that Merlin could lie comfortably, wrapped in Arthur’s scent, listening to Arthur’s quiet, heavy breaths as he slept.

Those journeys had always meant more to Merlin than he’d ever dare to admit. He loved them. He loved the way they made Arthur less guarded, how he slowly let down each of the barriers he kept tightly around himself as they drew further away from Camelot. He loved the way Arthur looked when he’d been riding hard all day in the rain, when his face was splattered with mud and his hair was dark with sweat. But most of all, he loved the way they could both lie on the ground, side by side, and for once neither one of them would be any higher than the other. The forests didn’t distinguish between prince and servant - for as long as they travelled through the twisted paths of the woods, they were both simply men.

But Gaius hadn’t relented, and Merlin knew that he could never have left the old man alone when he had asked for Merlin’s help. So he resigned himself to staying behind, and spent the evening in Arthur’s chambers casting longing looks at the prince’s bags as he packed them for the morning.
“If you want the bag so desperately, Merlin, you just have to ask,” a voice said, and Merlin looked up from where he’d been kneeling with his hands grasping the sides of Arthur’s bag. Arthur was standing in the doorway, and Merlin flushed as he tried to look less like he’d just been rubbing the leather straps that had sat against Arthur’s skin and more like he’d been doing - well, doing anything else but that. Arthur raised an eyebrow sardonically before walking over to the window and sitting down beside it, his foot propped up against the stone and his elbow resting casually across his knee.
“I’ll be back in several days,” he continued, and Merlin looked over at him, surprised. The patrol usually took at least a week.
“Why -“ he began, but Arthur cut him off with his look, the one that he always got when Merlin had just fallen straight into an insult without even suspecting that it was there.
“It’ll take less time without you,” Arthur said conversationally. “Everyone else knows how to ride properly.”
“I know how to ride, you prat.” Merlin had never been very good at it, because they hadn’t had many horses in Ealdor (he had a feeling he’d learnt how to ride on a cow), but he wasn’t terrible enough to delay them for half a week.
“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Arthur shot back. “And besides,” he said, as though he’d read Merlin’s mind, “We’ll be able to start moving earlier without lazy idiots to wake up.” Merlin thought about objecting, because that was only partly true. On days when he had Arthur’s bedroll warm beneath him he didn’t wake until Arthur pushed a foot into his face, or tore off his blankets, or threw him into the river (though Merlin suspected that Sir Leon was the force behind that particular incident). But when Merlin slept upon his own he often woke early, with Arthur’s scent fading off his skin and the bedroll flat and thin beneath him. He would sit on it, poking at the remains of the fire, and wonder why, when he had come so far from everything that he had ever known, he felt as though this was the place he was supposed to be all along - at Arthur’s side, watching over him, protecting him while he allowed himself to be a man rather than a prince.

He didn’t know when the feeling inside him had turned into love. He couldn’t remember the exact moment when he’d looked at Arthur and felt this within his chest, burning and solid and brand new. He only knew that he felt it stronger than ever as he watched Arthur gazing out the window, the moonlight pale upon his golden skin. Arthur turned his head to look over at Merlin, and he felt a fierce burn of desire flood his stomach. He wanted to run his hands over Arthur’s chest, and take him apart with his fingers, until he was no longer a prince or a noble, but rather a man writhing wordlessly in the throes of desire. But Arthur was a prince, and he did not want that, not from Merlin. So Merlin simply looked back down into the bag and continued to pack for a journey that Arthur, for once, had to take alone.

When he had finished, he placed the bags in the corner of Arthur’s chambers and turned to Arthur, who was still seated quietly by the window.
“Goodbye, sire,” he said, the words dropping unfamiliarly from his lips. He hadn’t left Arthur’s side for so long that he had forgotten how to bid him farewell. It had always been goodnight, sire, or sleep well, or sometimes simply a hastily flung prat as Merlin fled through the doorway. Those words had always held the promise of the morning, of breakfast eaten slowly at the table (Arthur’s) or bolted down roughly over boot polish and rags (Merlin’s); of long afternoons spent within reach of each other.

But this was different. There would be no greeting following soon after this goodbye, and Merlin knew that even though Arthur was returning, even though he was only going for a couple of days, he would still feel the prince’s absence like a cold weight within his chest. He knew that this farewell was special to him, but he also knew that it would not seem that way to Arthur. So he swallowed all of the words that he had wanted to say, and instead turned to leave.
“Merlin,” Arthur said, and Merlin looked around, confused by the unfamiliar tone of Arthur’s voice. The prince looked up at him, his eyes flickering yellow in the firelight, and Merlin thought for a brief moment that Arthur understood everything that he had ever needed to say, and everything that he had never said. But then Arthur blinked, and Merlin almost laughed at how close he’d come to revealing all of himself simply because Arthur looked at him.
“Yes?” he asked, and he could almost have sworn he saw a flash of disappointment flicker across Arthur’s face. But it was gone almost immediately, and Arthur shook his head imperiously.
“I know it’s a hard thing to ask, but do try not to kill any of Gaius’ patients while I’m gone,” he said, and Merlin felt an odd, unsatisfying surge of relief. With those words, Arthur had made sure that their goodbye was the same as all of the others, and that Merlin could fling a casual insult back at Arthur through the closing door of the prince’s chambers, safe in the knowledge that everything was as it should be, and that Arthur would return. But that relief was mixed with sadness, too, because the goodbye had become no different to any other moment of the day, and because that meant that Merlin’s absence, to Arthur, would mean nothing at all.

***

Merlin hadn’t realised how much time he spent with Arthur until Arthur wasn’t there. It was alright for the first few days, when Gaius had him running all over the castle collecting various herbs and liquids, but when Gaius had suddenly stumbled across the cause of the disease and had subsequently devised a cure, Merlin found that there was little left to distract him from the enormous gap that Arthur’s absence had torn through his life. He’d spent a lot of time with Gwen, after that, until she told him that she was sorry, but Morgana needed her. And so Merlin was left alone in the passageway with an aching heart and a head full of Arthur.

It was stupid, really. Arthur had only been gone three days, and he’d be back soon enough, Merlin reasoned. But even so, he felt miserable, and there was only one place in the world that would make that feeling shrink back inside itself and leave his chest feeling less like someone had cracked it open and sprinkled it with lead.

And so he had gone to Arthur’s room, because Merlin needed some reassurance that Arthur was planning on coming back - that he hadn’t dropped everything and fled from Camelot, fled from the future that Merlin saw bearing down upon them both. It was an irrational fear, because Merlin had never seen Arthur flee from anything in his life, but Arthur’s character was growing the slightest bit fuzzy in his mind, because for some reason, it was always the images of those Merlin cared about that he could never quite recall. So he’d walked the familiar route to Arthur’s room, and had stood in the place where he had sat two nights ago, wondering how it was that he could feel this lonely when Arthur had never known the whole of him, anyway.

It felt odd, being in Arthur’s room when it was so empty of everything that made it Arthur. There was no sword on the table, no boots in the corner, and no fire washing the room with warm yellow light. He sat down at the foot of the bed, not quite daring to sit on it, because he was keeping the careful barriers between all that he longed to do and all that he could do firmly in place even if Arthur was not there to notice. He raised his hand towards the wardrobe, muttering, and the clothes that Arthur had left behind soared out of it, landing gently in Merlin’s lap. He ran his hands over them, remembering how they felt when they were filled by the hard muscles of Arthur’s body.

Merlin tilted his head suddenly, a thought occurring to him. Stretching out one of Arthur’s red shirts in front of him, he waved a hand at it so that it rose into the air, hanging above him in the air. He moved his hand again, and a pair of Arthur’s breeches flew up to hover below the shirt, the ends almost grazing the floor. Merlin stared at them, trying to imagine that it was Arthur’s movements that made the shirt sway slightly from side to side, and Arthur’s legs - Arthur’s calves and knees and thighs - that made the material of the trousers swell. But it wasn’t Arthur, not really, because there was no face, no golden flesh, no softly curves of neck and jaw and collarbone. It was only an illusion; only magic. Merlin sighed, and was just about to release the spell when the door to Arthur’s chamber opened suddenly and a person walked in. That person stopped dead as he took in the hovering clothes, Merlin’s outstretched hand, and his eyes, glowing golden, and his face went white with something Merlin didn’t recognise.
“Sorcery,” Uther said slowly, as though he was drifting on the very edge of comprehension, unable to quite grasp what he was seeing. Merlin stared at him, open-mouthed. Uther had seen. Uther had seen. And he was still seeing, because Merlin’s eyes were still gold, and the clothes were still hanging in the space between the king and Merlin, as though trying to shield Merlin from the fury that was creeping slowly onto Uther’s face.
“Sorcerer,” he hissed, and Merlin felt a jolt of pure fear spark fiercely through his chest. This was different to how he imagined it would be - he’d been caught with all of his barriers down, doing something that, for once, wasn’t for anyone but himself. He had no defence against Uther, because he hadn’t been caught saving Camelot, or protecting Arthur, or destroying another sorcerer. Instead, he’d been discovered longing for a life that he would never have, and that stupid, selfish desire had left him with nothing with which to protect himself. And, seeing the hate burning across Uther’s face, he found that he was more frightened than he had ever been before.

The clothes were still hovering in the air, because Merlin had not let them down, and the spell that he needed to use to release them was so far beyond him at this point that he didn’t think he’d ever be able to find it again. He stared at them, wishing that Arthur was there, wishing that Arthur could stand between him and his father, because Merlin did not think that he’d have the strength to do it alone. But Arthur was not there, and Gaius was not there, and Merlin knew that this moment was his to face alone.
“Yes,” he said quietly, staring up at Uther, knowing that Uther would kill him for that admission and yet unable to stop himself from giving it. He had kept it bound tightly within himself for too long, and he knew that, regardless, Uther had killed people with less evidence than was currently spread out before him in Arthur’s room. So he let it out; he let Uther see that yes, he was a sorcerer. But he knew that Uther could also see that he was afraid.

He’d always wondered why the other sorcerers hadn’t escaped, when he’d seen them executed. He’d assumed that they weren’t strong enough - that their magic was great enough to get them noticed, but left them powerless against Camelot’s guards. But now, in the same position, with Uther staring down at him, he realised that it was something far, far different. To use magic so selfishly - to use magic to escape death, to escape destiny -would be proving Uther right. The king believed that sorcery was used to satisfy desires for wealth, and power, and death. To escape his end would be to suggest that Uther was right - that there was nothing noble about sorcery, and that those who wielded it were evil. He wouldn’t run. He wouldn’t give Uther that satisfaction.

And Merlin realised that if he ran, Arthur might not ever believe that he was anything other than what Uther said that he was. If he didn’t submit himself to Uther, then the prince might believe that he was evil, that despite all they had been through together, he had only ever been evil. Merlin couldn’t bring himself to destroy the one thing he’d come to rely upon in his life. He couldn’t bring himself to destroy the only true friendship that Arthur had ever known. So instead he set his jaw against the fear that was bubbling inside his chest, and stared at Uther with all of the pride that he possessed.

The king looked back at him with cold, hard hatred - hatred that Merlin knew he’d kept carefully smouldering inside him, burning away at his soul for all of the years since Ygraine passed out of the world. Uther saw danger and power and evil in Merlin, and Merlin knew that because of his proximity to Arthur, because of the way in which Merlin had weaved himself into Arthur’s life, Uther would not act as a king protecting his people but rather as a father protecting his son. Uther saw evil circling ever closer about his child, and he would not stop until he had destroyed it. There would be no reprieve, not this time.

“Guards,” Uther shouted, and Merlin closed his eyes, understanding that he had been judged, and that Uther had found him guilty. It was different from how Merlin had imagined it to happen. It was almost surreal - just him and Uther, alone in Arthur’s chambers. Merlin was still seated on the floor, and he still had Arthur’s clothes bunched untidily in his lap. But at that moment, the guards came charging through the door, and as they clasped their hands around Merlin’s arms and hauled him roughly to his feet, Merlin realised that it was real, and that he was going to die.

The guards marched him out into the passage, and they descended through the castle without meeting anyone. He was just beginning to wonder if the castle had been deserted when Morgana came wandering gracefully around the corner, stopping dead when she saw Merlin.
“Merlin? What have you done this time?” she asked, her mouth twitching into a resigned smile that Merlin would almost have taken offence to if he wasn’t so scared. He didn’t get dragged off to the dungeons that often, really.
“Sorcery,” the guard said shortly, before dragging Merlin past Morgana and down the next set of stairs. Merlin glimpsed Morgana’s face, pale and shocked, before she vanished above him and there was nothing but the gloom of the dungeons, deep and heavy around him.

The guards tossed him into a cell and slammed the iron-barred door shut behind him, retreating back up the passage until Merlin was left alone in the dark with his thoughts. He hadn’t thought that it would end like this. He hadn’t thought that this was what the dragon meant by destiny. There was so much that he’d expected to do - he’d wanted to watch as Arthur ascended the throne, and stand beside him in battle so that no matter what enemy they faced, Arthur would not be harmed. He’d wanted to meet other sorcerers without fear, and see Albion united under one king. But perhaps Merlin’s destiny wasn’t as earth-shattering or enormous as he’d imagined it to be. Perhaps Merlin’s destiny was merely to show Arthur the road he needed to take to attain his. Perhaps their paths were not entwined, as the dragon had said, but rather joined end to end, so that the conclusion of Merlin’s life - and the fulfilment of that destiny he’d come to believe in so deeply - was merely the start of Arthur’s.

He leaned back against the rough stone wall and let his magic wander freely outwards, until he could sense the whole of the castle and the tiny, busy bodies of its inhabitants, and hear a thousand different conversations within his mind. He’d done it before, but never so aimlessly as this. It made him feel as though he was more than just Merlin, and that even after he was gone others would still remain. Arthur would still remain. Suddenly, a conversation caught his attention, and he focused on it, allowing it to flood into his mind.

“He has practiced magic in Camelot, and he will be punished for his crimes!” Uther said, his face harsh and angry as he stared down at Morgana, standing before his throne.
“He is a boy, Uther!” she said. “Not a sorcerer, a boy!” But Uther stared at her as though she had lost all sense, and Merlin knew that he was as old as the sun in Uther’s mind, because Uther could not see Merlin, but rather the magic he carried within him.
“He is the enemy,” Uther said coldly.
“He is not my enemy,” she replied. “Nor Arthur’s, nor Camelot’s. He is not even your enemy, Uther, anyone could see that. Sorcery has possessed you far more than it has Merlin. Your hatred of it blinds you.”
“You will not speak to me like this! I have sworn to ensure that Camelot remains free of magic, and now I find it crawling within these very walls!” Uther glared at her, furious. “If I find that you knew, Morgana...” he trailed off threateningly. But Morgana only shook her head, her hair falling heavy and dark around her face.
“You cannot hope to eradicate it all,” she said softly. Uther looked at her with a sudden, quiet sadness, the lines of his face deepening and his hostility leaking slowly away as though he recognised for once that she was right, and that he would fail, because everything he had done had not been enough; everything that he could do would never be enough. Merlin recognised that look, and felt a surge of pity - not because he had wanted him to succeed, but rather because he knew that Uther had reached the moment in his life where his greatest achievements stood behind him, rather than ahead, and he could see that they weren’t as grand as those he’d once dreamed of. Uther’s reign was based upon destruction, and when he was gone there would be little left to remember him by but the fragments of magic torn apart.
Uther stood up from his throne, and Merlin could see a reflection of the king that he had once been in that stance - the king that he had been before magic had destroyed all that he treasured. “The sorcerer will be executed tomorrow,” he said coldly. “You may go.”
Morgana’s face was twisted into an expression Merlin hadn’t seen her wear before - a mixture of anger, and hatred, and disappointment. She turned away from Uther as the vision faded.

Merlin opened his eyes. He hadn’t known that Morgana would care, and he hadn’t known that she would stand up for him like she had. But there was something more important than that, he realised. Uther had made him aware of exactly how much time Merlin had left, and he felt his chest tighten with a cold wave of fear as he realised that his end had been decided, that it was marked out so clearly that Merlin could no longer avoid it.

Suddenly, there was a noise at the end of the passage, and Merlin rose to his feet as he saw Gaius walking towards him. Gaius stopped outside the cell, and stared at him with such sadness that Merlin felt ashamed that he hadn’t been sensible enough to avoid putting the old man through more suffering.
“Oh, Merlin, you foolish boy,” Gaius said, and Merlin gave a tiny smile, because he knew that Gaius was biting back a well, I did warn you. But the other man didn’t say it, and that meant that Gaius knew that the situation was too serious and too real for reprimands. 
“Sorry,” he said, and they both knew that it was an apology for everything - for getting caught, for forcing this on Gaius, for making the old man feel as though he had failed at keeping Merlin safe, because Merlin’s death was fast approaching and there was nothing that Gaius could do.

Gaius just looked at him, then reached a hand through the bars and clasped it hard around Merlin’s shoulder. It was the closest that Gaius would get to showing his forgiveness, because the old man could not open his mouth and admit that he was alright when he knew, deep down, that he would not be. Instead, he just nodded, his eyebrows strangely immobile.
“I’ll speak to him,” he said as he turned away, and Merlin knew that Gaius would try, even if he had no hope of succeeding.

It was quiet when Gaius left. Merlin breathed deeply, trying to feel something other than wild panic, curling suffocatingly through his chest. If he succumbed to it then he wouldn’t be able to stop himself, he would waste his final hours with a mind far too far from calm and his senses buzzing much too fast. He wanted to remember things - the look on Arthur’s face when he caught Merlin lazing on the floor rather than cleaning anything; the way he glowed with satisfied pride when he won in training, as though, deep down, he’d been expecting it to happen all along; the nights they had spent together in Arthur’s chambers, with the pitcher of wine half empty on the table and their minds buzzing with happiness. He wanted to see those things again, and he found that he treasured them more than ever now that he knew he never would.

Merlin lay back in the straw, his hands running over the cool stone floor beneath him. He wanted Arthur to know how he felt - he wanted Arthur to know everything, without having it torn apart and reshaped by Uther until it was no longer close enough to the truth. He sat upright again as an idea flashed across his mind, clear and sharp. He uttered a spell, and almost smiled as the items he needed appeared before him. He began to work, the time slipping by unnoticed as Merlin told Arthur everything that he’d never said aloud.

Part 2