Through the Ashes (1/?)
Title: Through the Ashes (1/?)
Author:
vail_kagami
Beta: nightrider101
Rating: PG
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Summary: It's been fortold that Arthur will return at a time when he is needed most. What Merlin needs most, right now, is for Arthur to remember who he is, and not to kill Merlin when he does.
Note: Written for my generous beta nightrider101, who won this story at a fanfic auction for a good cause.
Either growing up in these times of electronic technology, tv and motorized traffic had turned Arthur into a person that had little in common with the boy he was centuries ago, Merlin thought as he watched the other’s quickly retreating back through the rows of waiting cars, or he had simply forgotten how to handle him at this age. Several centuries of separation could do that to anyone.
To be fair, the expectation Arthur would simply accept his revelation with a shrug and an “Okay, let’s go save the world” might have been the slightest bit too optimistic. With a sigh, Merlin pulled closed the door his former friend and lover and current problem had left open, knowing that he had no hope of catching him on foot.
“Follow the running boy in the blue jacket,” he therefore told the driver. “As soon as the traffic lets you.”
1.
He’s standing on what was once a wide, open field of grass turned into a muddy acre by hundreds and hundreds of boots and hooves. Broken weapons are all that is left, and the blood of countless men soaking the earth. A split helmet to his left, a damaged shield ahead of him, beside the body of a dead horse, but all the things still useable are gone, as are all the corpses, of soldiers, knights and kings. He came here far, far too late.
Wind is blowing harshly over the battlefield, hindered by no tree and no rock, between the ground and the sky that’s dark and grey as if to match the desolation around him. Soon it will rain, and all the blood will be swallowed by the earth.
The rain doesn’t dare touch her, and no strand of hair is moving where she is waiting for him, at the edge of the lake.
-
The first time Merlin had the dream, he’d dreamed it from another’s point of view, seeing himself stand on the soft hill between broken amour and dead horses. It had been enough to convince him that it wasn’t just a dream based on his memory but a message, one he had been waiting for for ages. (This, and the brush of magic against his sleeping mind, stirring something inside him that had lain dormant for so long he had almost forgotten to miss it.)
Of course he had started searching then, only to discover that it took more than running out onto the street after his prophetic dream to see him waiting at the corner. Merlin knew because he’d done exactly that. There had been no one there but the guy selling chips wrapped in newspaper. He’d tried something different then.
With magic scratched from the list of possibilities, it had been a frustrating project that grew more disillusioning with each passing day. He didn’t find anything, but then, how was he supposed to? He could hardly stick papers to the house walls: “Looking for King, reborn, please call the following number” and the phone book had precious few people called Pendragon listed. Somehow, during his long, dark times of waiting, Merlin had never imagined himself calling random people in the middle of the night to ask them if they happened to have ruled the country, like, fifteen centuries ago. (When they said yes, he discovered, they were probably lying.)
There was the possibility; it occurred to him after a depressingly long time, that Arthur might not have the same name this time. After all, ‘reborn’ indicated a birth, which indicated parents, and they were unlikely to be called Igraine and Uther Pendragon. Also, if the dreams started when Arthur was born (again), he had to be a very young child right now and wouldn’t be able to react to Merlin’s attempts to find him. Nor would he be found in the phone book.
Google didn’t help either. It only made him want to murder anyone who’s ever tried to retell their tale.
What never occurred to Merlin was that Great Britain was not, in fact, the entire world, and that Arthur could be literally anywhere.
The fact that he found him in the end was so much of a coincidence that Merlin suspected the involvement of magic after all.
-
There was something wrong with the night sky, though Merlin couldn’t put his finger on it. There was darkness and stars, exactly as should be expected on a clear night. There were no foreign objects in the sky, not even a plane, and the constellations hadn’t hanged either. Merlin had had enough time to study them from every spot on the planet to be positive he would notice things such as that.
“You seem distracted.”
The words pulled him out of his musings and the sky once again disappeared behind the reflection of the brightly lit room in the window pane. As always when he heard that voice, Merlin stopped breathing for a second, and went perfectly still as something ran through him like a shudder, something that had nothing to do with the magic he wouldn’t be able to reach if he was anywhere else. Reminded there were things much more important than the sky or even anything wrong with it, he turned his attention to the other side of the table.
Arthur was watching him with a faintly amused expression on his face, lounging lazily with his arm across his knees and his feet on the bench. Seeing his face was a shock every time, because it was so familiar and because it was not. He was so young.
Not so much younger than he had been the first time Merlin saw him, that day in Camelot. But this was another life, he reminded himself. In this life, Arthur had grown up quite differently - he hadn’t been raised to take responsibility the moment he was old enough to walk, and in these times age didn’t mean quite the same thing.
It was the innocence in his eyes, Merlin had decided after days of knowing him again. At this age Uther’s son had already known how to fight and how to kill, had witnessed countless executions, and even though they’d never talked about it, Merlin had eventually learned that all his life, Arthur had borne the guilt of killing his mother. This boy in front of him had no death mother, no father whose expectations he felt he never could meet, and no kingdom that would one day depend on him to survive. He was just a boy in a junk food shop somewhere in Europe.
He knew nothing of the responsibility that had prevented the first Arthur, Merlin’s Arthur, from ever being this young, and for a while Merlin had resented this boy for having what he would have wished for his friend before finally realising that this was his friend, having just that.
This innocence wouldn’t be possible could he remember who he’d been before - sometimes Merlin felt guilty for being the one who would take it from him, and because that day couldn’t come soon enough. He’d waited for so long.
How to do it he didn’t know, however. Perhaps it would happen on its own when Arthur reached the age of twenty. Twenty, because he’d been that age when Merlin first met him, and this had to have something to do with him, otherwise he wouldn’t be here. Otherwise the dreams would never have come, and there would have been no use for his immortality if not for the sake of waiting for Arthur to return. He was meant for Arthur, Merlin knew with a certainty that was like a decision, and knew it had to be him who brought him back completely. He wanted it to be him.
And yet, when he tried to imagine that moment, the moment Arthur would look at him and know who he was and who they were, the dread stirred again inside his guts, along with the old, old feeling of guilt. He had to be the one to help Arthur through this new life before his old one started again, so he would know, when the memory came back, that Merlin was still his friend, despite everything, and that he could trust him.
He had to trust him. Merlin couldn’t bear the thought of losing that ever again.
If his theory concerning Arthur’s age was correct - and there was no indication whatsoever that it was - then Merlin still had four or five years to wait; too long and much too short to fix what was broken so very long ago. If he sat with Arthur every night until then and whispered his apologies to make the words settle in his dreams, the way they said messages could be planted into another’s subconscious in their sleep it wouldn’t be enough. Merlin had waited for countless lifetimes to say he was sorry, and he’d meant no harm, only to realise it made no difference and didn’t help. Not him and certainly not Arthur.
Maybe they could never again return to what once they took for granted.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “I’m a bit tired. Maybe it’d be best we left.”
“Must be your age,” Arthur replied, absentmindedly playing with the wrapping of his burger. Merlin didn’t look much older than thirty, but it was true none the less so he let the comment go.
“Did you decide on what to do next?” he asked, deliberately avoiding looking at the man who had just entered and the sense of otherness accompanying him. Oblivious, Arthur shrugged.
“Return home, I guess,” he said as he slipped into his jacket. “I have saved enough money for a plane ticket. I just need to tell my boss I quit, and could be back in England in a week.” It was typically Arthur, Merlin thought; he always told his employers when he left instead of just leaving despite only taking on small jobs to earn money for his travels, in places he would never see again. Just in case they counted on him being there, he’d told Merlin, proving that his sense of duty hadn’t been the result of upbringing alone.
The man who’d just entered wasn’t even trying to mask his intent staring at every other person in the room. And there weren’t terribly many people in the room at this time.
“Next week seems pretty early,” Merlin noted as he lead Arthur out through the back entrance. “Wouldn’t it be cheaper if you booked your flight weeks in advance and left a little later?”
Arthur wouldn’t accept any of the money Merlin had offered.
“Sure. But I have enough, and I feel like going home.”
Once Arthur had decided to do something, he couldn’t wait to do it. It was another thing that hadn’t changed.
The night air was cool in their faces. Merlin thought vaguely of lighting a cigarette, then remembered he’d stopped smoking ten years ago.
“Why England all of a sudden? I thought you haven’t been there for - what? Four years?”
“Five,” Arthur corrected him. The he shrugged. “I guess I just want to see it again, even though there’s no one left I know. In a few weeks it’ll probably annoy me again and I’m off to another continent.” He shivered in the cool breeze of mid autumn and closed his jacket. “Florida seems tempting at this time of year.”
“You’ll need a while to affort a ticket to Florida, especially with the rent in the good old UK. Before you can leave it’s summer again, and Florida is full of hurricanes.”
Merlin had spent more than one summer in Florida. (Just like he had spend more than one summer pretty much everywhere else.)
“Hurricanes are still better than summer in England,” Arthur decided, and wasn’t entirely wrong.
Merlin walked a little behind him, out of habit more than anything - always watching his back. At fifteen or sixteen, Arthur had already reached his full height, but in a life that hadn’t required him to ever hold a sword or kill a man with his bare hands he wasn’t quite as muscular. He was still stronger than Merlin looked, whose frame had never quite filled out.
When the son of Uther Pandragon had been at this age, he had almost lived half of the years he had. Merlin had often wondered, even before the end, if this knowledge was one of the things that had ultimately driven Morgana mad and away; the inevitability of fate that had haunted Merlin ever since he had let the little druid boy get away, that had flared up anew every time he had tried to correct that error and failed.
‘The future is written,’ Morgana had told him, her voice shaking with the drugs she took to enhance her visions. ‘It was written before either of us was born. You couldn’t have changed it then, and neither of us can change it now. In all the futures I have seen in my dreams, this one thing remains the same. You’re not to blame, and neither am I.’
But he had blamed her, and himself, and she had waited a long time before he stopped his vain struggle against fate and listened to the words she whispered in his ear. In the end he accepted her absolution and her promises as genuine and agreed to be led by her hand down the path her visions had mapped out for them. Maybe that had been inevitable as well.
There were no seeres anymore, and Merlin thought that perhaps this meant the future was no longer set. Except it had been predicted ages and ages ago, him and Arthur meeting again, and it had been predicted that there would be danger and change. Their paths were still drawn by fate, it seemed, and now Arthur wanted to return to England without any obvious reason, and Merlin couldn’t possibly let him go alone.
Not that letting him out of his sight would have been an option under any circumstances.
“You’re lucky, John,” he said, nearly stumbling over the name, as he always did. “I have a house close to London. It’s pretty large - I could spare a few rooms for you for the duration of your stay.”
Arthur looked doubtful. “You’d just let me live in your house? For free?” He sounded doubtful as well. In this life he had very early made the discovery that nothing is given for free.
“Of course. Like I said, I don’t need the space, and there’s no one else living there.”
Arthur didn’t bring the predictable argument that Merlin hardly even knew him. Instead he screwed up his face and pointed out, “That’s slightly creepy, old man.”
This time Merlin was doing the shrugging. “It’s your only chance if you want to get to Florida before hurricane season. I guess you’ll just have to trust me.” In return, Arthur looked at him with this thoughtful, slightly calculating expression he sometimes had, that in the old days, when he’d been prince and Merlin his manservant, had often translated as ‘There are many, many indications you are a sorcerer, and right now they are very difficult to ignore.’ Now it meant something completely different, or possibly something very similar, as Merlin felt the centuries melt backwards.
“The really creepy thing is,” Arthur - John - eventually admitted, “I actually do.”
-
It happened close to midnight, in late summer, when the nights were already cooling down and darkness no longer fell quite as late. Merlin was sitting in a taxi on his way to the airport, after only a day’s stay in the city. This month he had travelled from one country to the next so often he no longer even cared where exactly he was, but it felt vaguely familiar - like a fishing village he’d once visited would feel vaguely familiar once time had transformed it into Tokyo.
This wasn’t Tokyo. At least he knew that much.
There had been no particular reason for him to leave Britain, except that he was restless and frustrated because his search was going nowhere. He’d needed a break, a change of environment, and so, in the equivalent on a stressed student leaving his homework for half an hour to run blindly through the streets and get some fresh air, he had taken off to the airport and spent the next month hopping through Europe. (Which was how he knew this couldn’t be Tokyo.)
Apparently they had to cross the river by tunnel to get to their destination, but the tunnel was blocked by a traffic jam so the taxi driver opted for the bridge. Getting there from their current position wasn’t easy, but Merlin didn’t mind - if he missed his plane, he’d take the next one, and if that one didn’t go in the same direction, it was fine with him as well. The taxi fare that rose with every meter didn’t bother him either - fifteen centuries of healthy living had left him quite a wealthy man.
So he just stared out of the window in relaxed boredom, at the lights and people and cars, and the houses they passed, not paying attention to anything. The car was waiting in front of a red light in a street quite far from the main roads, when another taxi came to a stop before them. Distractedly, Merlin watched as its passenger got out and disappeared through a narrow door beside a still lit shop window.
Merlin was out of the car before he made any decision to move. The half-expected protest of the taxi driver didn’t come; perhaps he thought Merlin was part of a criminal gang who had just seen someone he needed to kill and was glad to be rid of him. As he went through the narrow door and up the stairs, a stray thought found its way into Merlin’s head, asking him to think before acting; all he had seen of that guy, after all, was a perfectly average back, and there were many people on this planet whose hair was that precise shade of blond (as he had been reminded on countless occasions). The thought passed without leaving a trace as Merlin hurried up the stairs and past various closed doors without wondering which to take.
The flat he eventually entered was small, just one room with a bed, a tiny television and an excuse for a kitchen. The blond man was sitting on the bed, his bag and jacket beside him, and when he looked up in shock at the madman storming into his room, Merlin didn’t think that he had been wrong, that this wasn’t a man but a boy; didn’t think that his worries had been unnecessary: Merlin hadn’t forgotten what he looked like, would recognize him anywhere. He stared at him, frozen on the spot, because the moment he faced this boy, something flared up inside Merlin like a wildfire, that reeked of the earth, the world and the Old, and had been lost for so, so long.
“Arthur,” he breathed, too quiet for the other to hear. For all of a second their eyes locked, both overwhelmed with shock for entirely different reasons, then Arthur was moving with that familiar speed of his, for his bag - but his eyes never left Merlin, and Merlin never thought of reacting. In fact, for the better part of a minute he didn’t even realise that the thing pointed at him was a weapon.
“Who are you?” Arthur demanded, destroying any remaining hope Merlin might have had about this being easy. “How did you get in here?”
“The door was open,” Merlin’s mouth said without bothering to exchange ideas with his brain. “I just wanted -”
“No, it was not.” Arthur’s voice was like a shot, his face showing anger now instead of shocked confusion and the gun in his hand didn’t waver, but Merlin paid no heed to any of that because he’d been wrong, so wrong in his assumptions. He could see it now, feel it with every fibre of his being: Arthur hadn’t been reborn, hadn’t returned to this world in any natural way. There was nothing natural about the boy in front of him. He was a being of magic, magic that surrounded him and reached out for Merlin to touch the magic inside him that he hadn’t been able to touch himself, until now - and he realised that Arthur was right: the door had been locked. In his haste he hadn’t even noticed how it had opened for him as he willed it to open.
But what shook Merlin more than anything was that despite everything, Arthur still felt exactly the same. Even before, he hadn’t been born in any natural way and magic had always been with him, even if he couldn’t grasp it, but back then magic had been everywhere, and Arthur’s nature had faded before that background. For the most part Merlin hadn’t even noticed.
Now it seemed like all the magic that had slowly faded from the world after Camelot had fallen had gathered in one place to take the shape of Arthur Pendragon. Even being near him was almost blinding, and the urge to reach out and touch him, driven by the reawakening power inside him joined with the urge to touch him born from memories and lifetimes of loneliness and loss and almost took over.
Merlin didn’t move, finally taking notice of the gun pointed at his face. “You don’t need that,” he said, not taking his eyes off Arthur’s face to glance at the weapon - God, to see him again! - while he wondered where the boy had even got a gun. If he recalled correctly, they weren’t easy to come by in this country. “I mean you no harm.”
“Right, you just came in to warn me of burglars,” Arthur replied through gritted teeth. “And now I suppose you want a reward for your effort.”
Some part of Merlin’s brain started working again, making him realise that storming in without an explanation or any idea where to go from here had not exactly been a plan thought up by a brilliant mind. This was, he thought, the most thoughtless thing he had done in almost forever. It had been so easy to carefully plan his every action the years before, when he hadn’t cared enough for anything to make him act without thinking. In fact, he had done more thinking than acting, until he started to believe that the stories depicting him as a wise old man were actually true. Now he stood here in this tiny flat and it was as if the other stories were true as well, the ones claiming him to be aging backwards, for suddenly he was twenty again and didn’t know what to say.
He thought he might have stammered incoherently for a bit, about having heard something but maybe it was the flat next door and maybe he should be going now (while he wanted to do anything but that). He must had made a truly idiotic impression, because eventually Arthur lowered the gun and said, incredulously, “If you really were a burglar, you would be the most incompetent one there ever was.” And he listed all the things that made breaking into this particular flat so stupid, starting with the fact that the one living in it was presently home, and besides that happened to be the only one around to carry a weapon, as if to rub in the sheer idiocy of Merlin’s action. It was so familiar that Merlin’s body acted on its own and out of habit rolled his eyes at him.
Arthur let the gun drop into the bag, and Merlin stuttered an excuse, like a teenager, and turned to go, his heart racing and screaming at him to stay. He would be back. He’d get his brain to work up something, and then he’d give Arthur some proper reason why he had to be near him, always. Already he could see himself spending the night on the other side of the street, watching the flat to make sure the boy didn’t leave and disappear on him.
Even the plan to accidentally trip Arthur into a pool of superglue and permanently stick them together was considered on the very short way to the door.
In the end he didn’t leave, because Arthur called him back and offered him a drink.
-
Merlin ignored the feeling of being followed. He’d felt like he was being followed for ages, when he’d slowly but steadily lost contact with the earth and had to learn to rely on the senses everyone else was restricted to. It took him long to get used to it, always feeling like he was missing something. Losing something that was so fundamentally him had been painful, but even that had been dulled by the awareness of being alone. Looking back now, the years mingled together in a nightmare-like haze.
His magic hadn’t been restored completely from one moment to the next. When not with Arthur, it dimmed almost as completely as before, but even in his presence it was merely there - Merlin could feel it, but not bend it to his will. Not yet.
But it was whispering to him again. Whispering of things that moved in the shadows, a vague song of secrecy and hidden movement that could warn of anything and nothing. Merlin didn’t understand its messages; the language was foreign to him now. He had never thought it would be so alien. Only now when it was finally returning to him did he feel abandoned.
Since the magic didn’t speak clearly to him anymore, Merlin asked his other senses, and they told him there was no danger to them except the possibility of getting hit by a car. He decided to believe them until he was once again able to not experience the whisper of the supernatural in the back of his head as vaguely threatening.
The grey city seemed even greyer than usual today, but at least the rain had stopped. Having fallen all night it had left water standing in the streets, and Merlin stepped right into a puddle and soaked the leg of his trousers up to the middle of his shin when he got out of the taxi. Cursing, he wished it wouldn’t cling to his skin uncomfortably for the next few hours and thought that nature really didn’t like him anymore.
The driver got his luggage out of the back of the car. Merlin paid the fare and took the single bag he had needed two weeks to track down and get back after leaving it behind in another taxi for his unexpected and somewhat anticlimactic reunion with his beloved King.
A cold, sharp wind was blowing, announcing the coming of winter. This was a good time to leave the country, and it would have been even better had Great Britain (A stubborn part of Merlin still called it Albion.) been a more charming alternative. As things were he was about to trade a cold and damp autumn for a damp and cold one.
And despite Arthur’s plans, he had little hope that either of them would be in Florida before winter.
The hall of the airport offered relief from the bad weather. An air of vacation and warmth filled the well heated rooms, probably transported there by the leaving and returning tourists.
A young man was talking on his mobile phone just behind the entrance, nearly blocking it with his large suitcase that had stickers from all over the world pasted to it. When Merlin had been his age, travelling from one end of the British Isles to the other had taken months.
There was an emblem on the back of the man’s jacket. Merlin stared at it without really noticing; distractedly trying to figure out which family it belonged to. There was no animal nor plant depicted on it as was usually the case, and while the colours spoke of Mercia, it was much plainer than any Lord would bear, least of all a King - just a geometrical shape, repeated inside itself. Very easy to remember, Merlin thought, and easier to copy than any he’d seen before.
“It’s the crest of a local football club,” a voice called him away from the knights of Camelot and back to the present. Merlin looked up at Arthur who’d appeared beside him with a holdall slung over his shoulder, and realised that he must have been very lost in thought to not have sensed his presence before.
“Of course it is,” he replied. Arthur raised his eyebrows at him, before pointing at the counter.
“Go check in. I’ll be waiting at the gate.” Watching him walk away, Merlin still had to fight the primal instinct to run after, and the old (silly, unnecessary) ache in his chest.
The woman at the check-in smiled brightly while her eyes regarded Merlin as if she was looking for fleas. Perhaps he missed the newest fashion in hairstyle again, or she didn’t like the fuzzy beard that graced his features these days in a vain attempt to make him seem mature. Merlin grinned at her as if he wouldn’t notice and the disdain in her eyes melted to be replaced by reluctant adoration. Yes, he still got it.
He also got dry trousers. Merlin didn’t even notice that until he was halfway to the gate.
“How did you know I was distracted by the club logo?” he asked when he found Arthur standing in the sitting area where all seats were taken.
Arthur shrugged. “It seemed obvious,” he said, before adding, almost reluctantly, “Happens to me all the time.”
Merlin nearly called him by his name then, and was only stopped by Arthur saying, “So. What a coincidence that I happened to have booked the same flight you wanted to go home with.” The sarcasm was as open in his voice as it had ever been, but Merlin had already accepted the fact that he came across as a bit of a creepy stalker.
“Not a coincidence at all,” he said. “I changed my flight to go the same day you do. Since you’re going to live in my house, it wouldn’t do for you to be there before me and not be able to get in.”
Arthur didn’t reply to that but shifted uncomfortably, looking away. Whether it was the acceptance of unrewarded kindness that troubled him, or the fact that he had agreed to live with someone he didn’t really know and who had been following him around for weeks, Merlin couldn’t say. He liked to imagine that Arthur did remember him on some unconscious level, that it was the old trust in him that made him accept his offer, but he knew that just as likely the boy could have fallen victim to the natural charisma that had opened too many doors for Merlin too easily not to be a little bit magical. It was so tempting to jump to conclusions that Merlin had to remind himself time and time again that this wasn’t his Arthur, not yet. Up until now this boy had lived a life in which Merlin didn’t matter. And if he disappeared from it - would Arthur even notice?
The thought was almost crushingly depressing. This was Arthur; Merlin recognized him in every gesture, every pout and smirk, but he didn’t recognize Merlin, and for one second, when their flight was called and Arthur turned to go, the realization of meaning nothing to the one who was the centre of Merlin’s world nearly broke him.
Which was when he noticed something else: the flight attendant was now repeating the call for their flight in English for the foreign passengers. Merlin didn’t need that service, because he understood languages. No matter where he was or if he had never been there ever before, he understood every word as if he’d grown up there. It was magic, a connection to the planet and its people even the fading of the mystical had not been able to take from him.
Arthur too spoke the language of this country nearly flawlessly. Merlin had heard him do it on several occasions without thinking anything of it, and only now, weeks after the fact did he suddenly remember that the first time they met, when Merlin had stormed into Arthur’s tiny flat without warning, Arthur had addressed him in English.
- tbc
April 16, 2009
Author:
vail_kagami
Beta: nightrider101
Rating: PG
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Summary: It's been fortold that Arthur will return at a time when he is needed most. What Merlin needs most, right now, is for Arthur to remember who he is, and not to kill Merlin when he does.
Note: Written for my generous beta nightrider101, who won this story at a fanfic auction for a good cause.
Either growing up in these times of electronic technology, tv and motorized traffic had turned Arthur into a person that had little in common with the boy he was centuries ago, Merlin thought as he watched the other’s quickly retreating back through the rows of waiting cars, or he had simply forgotten how to handle him at this age. Several centuries of separation could do that to anyone.
To be fair, the expectation Arthur would simply accept his revelation with a shrug and an “Okay, let’s go save the world” might have been the slightest bit too optimistic. With a sigh, Merlin pulled closed the door his former friend and lover and current problem had left open, knowing that he had no hope of catching him on foot.
“Follow the running boy in the blue jacket,” he therefore told the driver. “As soon as the traffic lets you.”
1.
He’s standing on what was once a wide, open field of grass turned into a muddy acre by hundreds and hundreds of boots and hooves. Broken weapons are all that is left, and the blood of countless men soaking the earth. A split helmet to his left, a damaged shield ahead of him, beside the body of a dead horse, but all the things still useable are gone, as are all the corpses, of soldiers, knights and kings. He came here far, far too late.
Wind is blowing harshly over the battlefield, hindered by no tree and no rock, between the ground and the sky that’s dark and grey as if to match the desolation around him. Soon it will rain, and all the blood will be swallowed by the earth.
The rain doesn’t dare touch her, and no strand of hair is moving where she is waiting for him, at the edge of the lake.
-
The first time Merlin had the dream, he’d dreamed it from another’s point of view, seeing himself stand on the soft hill between broken amour and dead horses. It had been enough to convince him that it wasn’t just a dream based on his memory but a message, one he had been waiting for for ages. (This, and the brush of magic against his sleeping mind, stirring something inside him that had lain dormant for so long he had almost forgotten to miss it.)
Of course he had started searching then, only to discover that it took more than running out onto the street after his prophetic dream to see him waiting at the corner. Merlin knew because he’d done exactly that. There had been no one there but the guy selling chips wrapped in newspaper. He’d tried something different then.
With magic scratched from the list of possibilities, it had been a frustrating project that grew more disillusioning with each passing day. He didn’t find anything, but then, how was he supposed to? He could hardly stick papers to the house walls: “Looking for King, reborn, please call the following number” and the phone book had precious few people called Pendragon listed. Somehow, during his long, dark times of waiting, Merlin had never imagined himself calling random people in the middle of the night to ask them if they happened to have ruled the country, like, fifteen centuries ago. (When they said yes, he discovered, they were probably lying.)
There was the possibility; it occurred to him after a depressingly long time, that Arthur might not have the same name this time. After all, ‘reborn’ indicated a birth, which indicated parents, and they were unlikely to be called Igraine and Uther Pendragon. Also, if the dreams started when Arthur was born (again), he had to be a very young child right now and wouldn’t be able to react to Merlin’s attempts to find him. Nor would he be found in the phone book.
Google didn’t help either. It only made him want to murder anyone who’s ever tried to retell their tale.
What never occurred to Merlin was that Great Britain was not, in fact, the entire world, and that Arthur could be literally anywhere.
The fact that he found him in the end was so much of a coincidence that Merlin suspected the involvement of magic after all.
-
There was something wrong with the night sky, though Merlin couldn’t put his finger on it. There was darkness and stars, exactly as should be expected on a clear night. There were no foreign objects in the sky, not even a plane, and the constellations hadn’t hanged either. Merlin had had enough time to study them from every spot on the planet to be positive he would notice things such as that.
“You seem distracted.”
The words pulled him out of his musings and the sky once again disappeared behind the reflection of the brightly lit room in the window pane. As always when he heard that voice, Merlin stopped breathing for a second, and went perfectly still as something ran through him like a shudder, something that had nothing to do with the magic he wouldn’t be able to reach if he was anywhere else. Reminded there were things much more important than the sky or even anything wrong with it, he turned his attention to the other side of the table.
Arthur was watching him with a faintly amused expression on his face, lounging lazily with his arm across his knees and his feet on the bench. Seeing his face was a shock every time, because it was so familiar and because it was not. He was so young.
Not so much younger than he had been the first time Merlin saw him, that day in Camelot. But this was another life, he reminded himself. In this life, Arthur had grown up quite differently - he hadn’t been raised to take responsibility the moment he was old enough to walk, and in these times age didn’t mean quite the same thing.
It was the innocence in his eyes, Merlin had decided after days of knowing him again. At this age Uther’s son had already known how to fight and how to kill, had witnessed countless executions, and even though they’d never talked about it, Merlin had eventually learned that all his life, Arthur had borne the guilt of killing his mother. This boy in front of him had no death mother, no father whose expectations he felt he never could meet, and no kingdom that would one day depend on him to survive. He was just a boy in a junk food shop somewhere in Europe.
He knew nothing of the responsibility that had prevented the first Arthur, Merlin’s Arthur, from ever being this young, and for a while Merlin had resented this boy for having what he would have wished for his friend before finally realising that this was his friend, having just that.
This innocence wouldn’t be possible could he remember who he’d been before - sometimes Merlin felt guilty for being the one who would take it from him, and because that day couldn’t come soon enough. He’d waited for so long.
How to do it he didn’t know, however. Perhaps it would happen on its own when Arthur reached the age of twenty. Twenty, because he’d been that age when Merlin first met him, and this had to have something to do with him, otherwise he wouldn’t be here. Otherwise the dreams would never have come, and there would have been no use for his immortality if not for the sake of waiting for Arthur to return. He was meant for Arthur, Merlin knew with a certainty that was like a decision, and knew it had to be him who brought him back completely. He wanted it to be him.
And yet, when he tried to imagine that moment, the moment Arthur would look at him and know who he was and who they were, the dread stirred again inside his guts, along with the old, old feeling of guilt. He had to be the one to help Arthur through this new life before his old one started again, so he would know, when the memory came back, that Merlin was still his friend, despite everything, and that he could trust him.
He had to trust him. Merlin couldn’t bear the thought of losing that ever again.
If his theory concerning Arthur’s age was correct - and there was no indication whatsoever that it was - then Merlin still had four or five years to wait; too long and much too short to fix what was broken so very long ago. If he sat with Arthur every night until then and whispered his apologies to make the words settle in his dreams, the way they said messages could be planted into another’s subconscious in their sleep it wouldn’t be enough. Merlin had waited for countless lifetimes to say he was sorry, and he’d meant no harm, only to realise it made no difference and didn’t help. Not him and certainly not Arthur.
Maybe they could never again return to what once they took for granted.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “I’m a bit tired. Maybe it’d be best we left.”
“Must be your age,” Arthur replied, absentmindedly playing with the wrapping of his burger. Merlin didn’t look much older than thirty, but it was true none the less so he let the comment go.
“Did you decide on what to do next?” he asked, deliberately avoiding looking at the man who had just entered and the sense of otherness accompanying him. Oblivious, Arthur shrugged.
“Return home, I guess,” he said as he slipped into his jacket. “I have saved enough money for a plane ticket. I just need to tell my boss I quit, and could be back in England in a week.” It was typically Arthur, Merlin thought; he always told his employers when he left instead of just leaving despite only taking on small jobs to earn money for his travels, in places he would never see again. Just in case they counted on him being there, he’d told Merlin, proving that his sense of duty hadn’t been the result of upbringing alone.
The man who’d just entered wasn’t even trying to mask his intent staring at every other person in the room. And there weren’t terribly many people in the room at this time.
“Next week seems pretty early,” Merlin noted as he lead Arthur out through the back entrance. “Wouldn’t it be cheaper if you booked your flight weeks in advance and left a little later?”
Arthur wouldn’t accept any of the money Merlin had offered.
“Sure. But I have enough, and I feel like going home.”
Once Arthur had decided to do something, he couldn’t wait to do it. It was another thing that hadn’t changed.
The night air was cool in their faces. Merlin thought vaguely of lighting a cigarette, then remembered he’d stopped smoking ten years ago.
“Why England all of a sudden? I thought you haven’t been there for - what? Four years?”
“Five,” Arthur corrected him. The he shrugged. “I guess I just want to see it again, even though there’s no one left I know. In a few weeks it’ll probably annoy me again and I’m off to another continent.” He shivered in the cool breeze of mid autumn and closed his jacket. “Florida seems tempting at this time of year.”
“You’ll need a while to affort a ticket to Florida, especially with the rent in the good old UK. Before you can leave it’s summer again, and Florida is full of hurricanes.”
Merlin had spent more than one summer in Florida. (Just like he had spend more than one summer pretty much everywhere else.)
“Hurricanes are still better than summer in England,” Arthur decided, and wasn’t entirely wrong.
Merlin walked a little behind him, out of habit more than anything - always watching his back. At fifteen or sixteen, Arthur had already reached his full height, but in a life that hadn’t required him to ever hold a sword or kill a man with his bare hands he wasn’t quite as muscular. He was still stronger than Merlin looked, whose frame had never quite filled out.
When the son of Uther Pandragon had been at this age, he had almost lived half of the years he had. Merlin had often wondered, even before the end, if this knowledge was one of the things that had ultimately driven Morgana mad and away; the inevitability of fate that had haunted Merlin ever since he had let the little druid boy get away, that had flared up anew every time he had tried to correct that error and failed.
‘The future is written,’ Morgana had told him, her voice shaking with the drugs she took to enhance her visions. ‘It was written before either of us was born. You couldn’t have changed it then, and neither of us can change it now. In all the futures I have seen in my dreams, this one thing remains the same. You’re not to blame, and neither am I.’
But he had blamed her, and himself, and she had waited a long time before he stopped his vain struggle against fate and listened to the words she whispered in his ear. In the end he accepted her absolution and her promises as genuine and agreed to be led by her hand down the path her visions had mapped out for them. Maybe that had been inevitable as well.
There were no seeres anymore, and Merlin thought that perhaps this meant the future was no longer set. Except it had been predicted ages and ages ago, him and Arthur meeting again, and it had been predicted that there would be danger and change. Their paths were still drawn by fate, it seemed, and now Arthur wanted to return to England without any obvious reason, and Merlin couldn’t possibly let him go alone.
Not that letting him out of his sight would have been an option under any circumstances.
“You’re lucky, John,” he said, nearly stumbling over the name, as he always did. “I have a house close to London. It’s pretty large - I could spare a few rooms for you for the duration of your stay.”
Arthur looked doubtful. “You’d just let me live in your house? For free?” He sounded doubtful as well. In this life he had very early made the discovery that nothing is given for free.
“Of course. Like I said, I don’t need the space, and there’s no one else living there.”
Arthur didn’t bring the predictable argument that Merlin hardly even knew him. Instead he screwed up his face and pointed out, “That’s slightly creepy, old man.”
This time Merlin was doing the shrugging. “It’s your only chance if you want to get to Florida before hurricane season. I guess you’ll just have to trust me.” In return, Arthur looked at him with this thoughtful, slightly calculating expression he sometimes had, that in the old days, when he’d been prince and Merlin his manservant, had often translated as ‘There are many, many indications you are a sorcerer, and right now they are very difficult to ignore.’ Now it meant something completely different, or possibly something very similar, as Merlin felt the centuries melt backwards.
“The really creepy thing is,” Arthur - John - eventually admitted, “I actually do.”
-
It happened close to midnight, in late summer, when the nights were already cooling down and darkness no longer fell quite as late. Merlin was sitting in a taxi on his way to the airport, after only a day’s stay in the city. This month he had travelled from one country to the next so often he no longer even cared where exactly he was, but it felt vaguely familiar - like a fishing village he’d once visited would feel vaguely familiar once time had transformed it into Tokyo.
This wasn’t Tokyo. At least he knew that much.
There had been no particular reason for him to leave Britain, except that he was restless and frustrated because his search was going nowhere. He’d needed a break, a change of environment, and so, in the equivalent on a stressed student leaving his homework for half an hour to run blindly through the streets and get some fresh air, he had taken off to the airport and spent the next month hopping through Europe. (Which was how he knew this couldn’t be Tokyo.)
Apparently they had to cross the river by tunnel to get to their destination, but the tunnel was blocked by a traffic jam so the taxi driver opted for the bridge. Getting there from their current position wasn’t easy, but Merlin didn’t mind - if he missed his plane, he’d take the next one, and if that one didn’t go in the same direction, it was fine with him as well. The taxi fare that rose with every meter didn’t bother him either - fifteen centuries of healthy living had left him quite a wealthy man.
So he just stared out of the window in relaxed boredom, at the lights and people and cars, and the houses they passed, not paying attention to anything. The car was waiting in front of a red light in a street quite far from the main roads, when another taxi came to a stop before them. Distractedly, Merlin watched as its passenger got out and disappeared through a narrow door beside a still lit shop window.
Merlin was out of the car before he made any decision to move. The half-expected protest of the taxi driver didn’t come; perhaps he thought Merlin was part of a criminal gang who had just seen someone he needed to kill and was glad to be rid of him. As he went through the narrow door and up the stairs, a stray thought found its way into Merlin’s head, asking him to think before acting; all he had seen of that guy, after all, was a perfectly average back, and there were many people on this planet whose hair was that precise shade of blond (as he had been reminded on countless occasions). The thought passed without leaving a trace as Merlin hurried up the stairs and past various closed doors without wondering which to take.
The flat he eventually entered was small, just one room with a bed, a tiny television and an excuse for a kitchen. The blond man was sitting on the bed, his bag and jacket beside him, and when he looked up in shock at the madman storming into his room, Merlin didn’t think that he had been wrong, that this wasn’t a man but a boy; didn’t think that his worries had been unnecessary: Merlin hadn’t forgotten what he looked like, would recognize him anywhere. He stared at him, frozen on the spot, because the moment he faced this boy, something flared up inside Merlin like a wildfire, that reeked of the earth, the world and the Old, and had been lost for so, so long.
“Arthur,” he breathed, too quiet for the other to hear. For all of a second their eyes locked, both overwhelmed with shock for entirely different reasons, then Arthur was moving with that familiar speed of his, for his bag - but his eyes never left Merlin, and Merlin never thought of reacting. In fact, for the better part of a minute he didn’t even realise that the thing pointed at him was a weapon.
“Who are you?” Arthur demanded, destroying any remaining hope Merlin might have had about this being easy. “How did you get in here?”
“The door was open,” Merlin’s mouth said without bothering to exchange ideas with his brain. “I just wanted -”
“No, it was not.” Arthur’s voice was like a shot, his face showing anger now instead of shocked confusion and the gun in his hand didn’t waver, but Merlin paid no heed to any of that because he’d been wrong, so wrong in his assumptions. He could see it now, feel it with every fibre of his being: Arthur hadn’t been reborn, hadn’t returned to this world in any natural way. There was nothing natural about the boy in front of him. He was a being of magic, magic that surrounded him and reached out for Merlin to touch the magic inside him that he hadn’t been able to touch himself, until now - and he realised that Arthur was right: the door had been locked. In his haste he hadn’t even noticed how it had opened for him as he willed it to open.
But what shook Merlin more than anything was that despite everything, Arthur still felt exactly the same. Even before, he hadn’t been born in any natural way and magic had always been with him, even if he couldn’t grasp it, but back then magic had been everywhere, and Arthur’s nature had faded before that background. For the most part Merlin hadn’t even noticed.
Now it seemed like all the magic that had slowly faded from the world after Camelot had fallen had gathered in one place to take the shape of Arthur Pendragon. Even being near him was almost blinding, and the urge to reach out and touch him, driven by the reawakening power inside him joined with the urge to touch him born from memories and lifetimes of loneliness and loss and almost took over.
Merlin didn’t move, finally taking notice of the gun pointed at his face. “You don’t need that,” he said, not taking his eyes off Arthur’s face to glance at the weapon - God, to see him again! - while he wondered where the boy had even got a gun. If he recalled correctly, they weren’t easy to come by in this country. “I mean you no harm.”
“Right, you just came in to warn me of burglars,” Arthur replied through gritted teeth. “And now I suppose you want a reward for your effort.”
Some part of Merlin’s brain started working again, making him realise that storming in without an explanation or any idea where to go from here had not exactly been a plan thought up by a brilliant mind. This was, he thought, the most thoughtless thing he had done in almost forever. It had been so easy to carefully plan his every action the years before, when he hadn’t cared enough for anything to make him act without thinking. In fact, he had done more thinking than acting, until he started to believe that the stories depicting him as a wise old man were actually true. Now he stood here in this tiny flat and it was as if the other stories were true as well, the ones claiming him to be aging backwards, for suddenly he was twenty again and didn’t know what to say.
He thought he might have stammered incoherently for a bit, about having heard something but maybe it was the flat next door and maybe he should be going now (while he wanted to do anything but that). He must had made a truly idiotic impression, because eventually Arthur lowered the gun and said, incredulously, “If you really were a burglar, you would be the most incompetent one there ever was.” And he listed all the things that made breaking into this particular flat so stupid, starting with the fact that the one living in it was presently home, and besides that happened to be the only one around to carry a weapon, as if to rub in the sheer idiocy of Merlin’s action. It was so familiar that Merlin’s body acted on its own and out of habit rolled his eyes at him.
Arthur let the gun drop into the bag, and Merlin stuttered an excuse, like a teenager, and turned to go, his heart racing and screaming at him to stay. He would be back. He’d get his brain to work up something, and then he’d give Arthur some proper reason why he had to be near him, always. Already he could see himself spending the night on the other side of the street, watching the flat to make sure the boy didn’t leave and disappear on him.
Even the plan to accidentally trip Arthur into a pool of superglue and permanently stick them together was considered on the very short way to the door.
In the end he didn’t leave, because Arthur called him back and offered him a drink.
-
Merlin ignored the feeling of being followed. He’d felt like he was being followed for ages, when he’d slowly but steadily lost contact with the earth and had to learn to rely on the senses everyone else was restricted to. It took him long to get used to it, always feeling like he was missing something. Losing something that was so fundamentally him had been painful, but even that had been dulled by the awareness of being alone. Looking back now, the years mingled together in a nightmare-like haze.
His magic hadn’t been restored completely from one moment to the next. When not with Arthur, it dimmed almost as completely as before, but even in his presence it was merely there - Merlin could feel it, but not bend it to his will. Not yet.
But it was whispering to him again. Whispering of things that moved in the shadows, a vague song of secrecy and hidden movement that could warn of anything and nothing. Merlin didn’t understand its messages; the language was foreign to him now. He had never thought it would be so alien. Only now when it was finally returning to him did he feel abandoned.
Since the magic didn’t speak clearly to him anymore, Merlin asked his other senses, and they told him there was no danger to them except the possibility of getting hit by a car. He decided to believe them until he was once again able to not experience the whisper of the supernatural in the back of his head as vaguely threatening.
The grey city seemed even greyer than usual today, but at least the rain had stopped. Having fallen all night it had left water standing in the streets, and Merlin stepped right into a puddle and soaked the leg of his trousers up to the middle of his shin when he got out of the taxi. Cursing, he wished it wouldn’t cling to his skin uncomfortably for the next few hours and thought that nature really didn’t like him anymore.
The driver got his luggage out of the back of the car. Merlin paid the fare and took the single bag he had needed two weeks to track down and get back after leaving it behind in another taxi for his unexpected and somewhat anticlimactic reunion with his beloved King.
A cold, sharp wind was blowing, announcing the coming of winter. This was a good time to leave the country, and it would have been even better had Great Britain (A stubborn part of Merlin still called it Albion.) been a more charming alternative. As things were he was about to trade a cold and damp autumn for a damp and cold one.
And despite Arthur’s plans, he had little hope that either of them would be in Florida before winter.
The hall of the airport offered relief from the bad weather. An air of vacation and warmth filled the well heated rooms, probably transported there by the leaving and returning tourists.
A young man was talking on his mobile phone just behind the entrance, nearly blocking it with his large suitcase that had stickers from all over the world pasted to it. When Merlin had been his age, travelling from one end of the British Isles to the other had taken months.
There was an emblem on the back of the man’s jacket. Merlin stared at it without really noticing; distractedly trying to figure out which family it belonged to. There was no animal nor plant depicted on it as was usually the case, and while the colours spoke of Mercia, it was much plainer than any Lord would bear, least of all a King - just a geometrical shape, repeated inside itself. Very easy to remember, Merlin thought, and easier to copy than any he’d seen before.
“It’s the crest of a local football club,” a voice called him away from the knights of Camelot and back to the present. Merlin looked up at Arthur who’d appeared beside him with a holdall slung over his shoulder, and realised that he must have been very lost in thought to not have sensed his presence before.
“Of course it is,” he replied. Arthur raised his eyebrows at him, before pointing at the counter.
“Go check in. I’ll be waiting at the gate.” Watching him walk away, Merlin still had to fight the primal instinct to run after, and the old (silly, unnecessary) ache in his chest.
The woman at the check-in smiled brightly while her eyes regarded Merlin as if she was looking for fleas. Perhaps he missed the newest fashion in hairstyle again, or she didn’t like the fuzzy beard that graced his features these days in a vain attempt to make him seem mature. Merlin grinned at her as if he wouldn’t notice and the disdain in her eyes melted to be replaced by reluctant adoration. Yes, he still got it.
He also got dry trousers. Merlin didn’t even notice that until he was halfway to the gate.
“How did you know I was distracted by the club logo?” he asked when he found Arthur standing in the sitting area where all seats were taken.
Arthur shrugged. “It seemed obvious,” he said, before adding, almost reluctantly, “Happens to me all the time.”
Merlin nearly called him by his name then, and was only stopped by Arthur saying, “So. What a coincidence that I happened to have booked the same flight you wanted to go home with.” The sarcasm was as open in his voice as it had ever been, but Merlin had already accepted the fact that he came across as a bit of a creepy stalker.
“Not a coincidence at all,” he said. “I changed my flight to go the same day you do. Since you’re going to live in my house, it wouldn’t do for you to be there before me and not be able to get in.”
Arthur didn’t reply to that but shifted uncomfortably, looking away. Whether it was the acceptance of unrewarded kindness that troubled him, or the fact that he had agreed to live with someone he didn’t really know and who had been following him around for weeks, Merlin couldn’t say. He liked to imagine that Arthur did remember him on some unconscious level, that it was the old trust in him that made him accept his offer, but he knew that just as likely the boy could have fallen victim to the natural charisma that had opened too many doors for Merlin too easily not to be a little bit magical. It was so tempting to jump to conclusions that Merlin had to remind himself time and time again that this wasn’t his Arthur, not yet. Up until now this boy had lived a life in which Merlin didn’t matter. And if he disappeared from it - would Arthur even notice?
The thought was almost crushingly depressing. This was Arthur; Merlin recognized him in every gesture, every pout and smirk, but he didn’t recognize Merlin, and for one second, when their flight was called and Arthur turned to go, the realization of meaning nothing to the one who was the centre of Merlin’s world nearly broke him.
Which was when he noticed something else: the flight attendant was now repeating the call for their flight in English for the foreign passengers. Merlin didn’t need that service, because he understood languages. No matter where he was or if he had never been there ever before, he understood every word as if he’d grown up there. It was magic, a connection to the planet and its people even the fading of the mystical had not been able to take from him.
Arthur too spoke the language of this country nearly flawlessly. Merlin had heard him do it on several occasions without thinking anything of it, and only now, weeks after the fact did he suddenly remember that the first time they met, when Merlin had stormed into Arthur’s tiny flat without warning, Arthur had addressed him in English.
- tbc
April 16, 2009