Through the Ashes (2/?)
Title: Through the Ashes (2/?)
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.
One would think that having lived through the entire development of motorized vehicles, Merlin would have a general idea of how far and how fast they could travel. The opposite was the case; Merlin blamed it on the fact that he had spent a few centuries in a disinterested haze while most things passed though his mind without leaving a lingering impression. When the first car had been invented he’d been curious, when man managed to fly for the first time he’d been at the same time impressed, wistful and hopeful - but every further step on the way to modern airplanes had just been something that happened, somewhere, and had nothing to do with him.
Merlin had been able to fly, once. He could turn into a falcon and soar the sky or ride on dragons and griffins. Modern technology, he found, couldn’t take him back there. It simply didn’t feel real enough.
So, despite having made the same trip dozens of times before (the first time in a Saxon longboat), Merlin still was surprised when the plane started to sink not long after having started. Beside him, Arthur was ignoring Merlin’s presence with silent determination, either reading the science fiction novel he had bought for the flight or gazing out of the window. The light of the setting sun reflected in his eyes when he did that, making them shine. The sights outside seemed to fascinate him.
“Excuse me,” the woman sitting on the seat beside Merlin said with an accentuation to her words that spoke of schoolbook English. She had been rummaging through her handbag for the last five minutes, and now it seemed she had given up her search for whatever she was looking for. “Do you happen to have a handkerchief?” She sniffed. “I can’t seem to find mine.”
Merlin knew he had none, but patted his pockets anyway, out of politeness - no one could say he didn’t at least try. “Sorry. Usually I have some with me, but today I’m wearing the wrong jacket.”
The woman looked at him as if it was a crime against humanity not to have handkerchiefs at the ready, the old hypocrite. “What about your son?”
Merlin was still trying to relate her words to the here and now when she half leaned over him to poke Arthur’s arm. “Excuse me, would you happen to have a handkerchief?”
Arthur turned to look at the woman, and Merlin, his mouth hanging open in speechlessness, turned to look at Arthur, just in time to see the last traces of a grin disappear behind a mask of indifferent innocence. “Of course I do,” he said. “Just a second.” He quickly searched through the pockets of his jean jacket to produce a box of Tempos and hand it to the lady. “Here you go.”
“He’s not my son,” Merlin burst out, disbelief still evident in his voice. He didn’t look that old, did he? What a silly assumption!
It made him feel slightly perverted.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” the woman exclaimed in between blowing her nose. “It’s just, I saw you talking earlier, and I assumed you belonged together. But now you mention it, you look nothing like each other.”
“I got my looks from my mother’s side of the family,” Arthur mentioned what he couldn’t know was true. He grinned in a way only Merlin could identify as evil. “But really, do I look like thirty to you?” Conspiratorially leaning over to the woman, he stage whispered, “He’s my grandfather.”
“Who, despite his very old age, isn’t deaf yet,” Merlin mentioned dryly. “And who, as your legal guardian, can ground you for life if you don’t shut up this second.”
Arthur leaned back. “I better do as he says,” he said apologetically. “He’s very strict.”
No further word was spoken between them until the plane landed, but silently was Merlin still fuming. Of course it was impossible to say at what age exactly he’d stopped aging, but he was convinced that it wasn’t long after Arthur had died - not that he had paid much attention to his appearance at that time. There was no way he looked any older than thirty-five, his vanity assured him, and while there was still the chance of him having impregnated some girl as a teenager, it definitely wasn’t the obvious conclusion, in his opinion. Why didn’t that woman just assume that they were friends travelling together, or student and teacher or something?
Or lovers?
Because this century has still got a stick up its arse long enough to come out of its mouth, that’s why, the realistic part of his mind whispered. And because he looks half your age and anyone suspecting you to be in a sexual relationship would call the police.
Not for the first time Merlin wished Arthur had come back two or three years earlier so he’d have been older when Merlin found him. It wouldn’t make a difference for the several centuries wide age gab between them, but it would have looked better.
Don’t worry, his mind whispered again. Soon he’ll look your age. And then he’ll look older, and older, and eventually he’ll die. If he survives long enough this time, that is. Merlin hated his mind with a passion.
-
The sunset above the clouds, as far as Merlin could see it, had been beautiful. Peaceful and calm, the kind of magic open for everyone. Getting out of the plane was like entering a different dimension since the clouds were a lot less charming from below. On the other side they had glowed red and yellow and purple in the fading sunlight. From this side they were just grey.
“Welcome to England,” Arthur muttered when they stepped out of the hall and into the soft, cold rain. “Tell me again why I wanted to come back here.”
“You never told me,” Merlin said, adding: “Do you even know?”
For a second Arthur looked confused, as if he really didn’t know. Destiny, the bloody dragon whispered in Merlin’s memory, as if he had found shelter there before disappearing like all the other creatures of old.
Then Arthur shook off his confusion. “Whatever the reason, I’m sure it wasn’t the weather,” he said carelessly.
There were enough taxis standing around for them not to have to wait. It was unusual, as far as Merlin could recall, but this he believed to be simply luck - even at his most powerful, his magic wouldn’t have had power over taxi drivers.
Inside, he gave the driver the address of Martin Rogers, unknown millionaire (or was it billionaire? He hadn’t really looked at his bank account since eighteen sixty-three.) and unemployed hermit. Merlin hadn’t used his real name since he had, a few years ago, found “Merlin Emrys” on a website called “The 100 Most Stupid Names Found in the British Phone Book”.
The name tasted as alien on his tongue as Arthur’s current one did. He’d never felt like Martin Rogers, but since Martin Rogers had no friends, not many people addressed him with this name and it wasn’t much of a problem.
-
The house they arrived at, eventually, was not exactly what John had expected. For one, it was large. Good, Martin had told him it had more rooms than a bachelor really had use for, but for John, who had spend the past few years living in flats that rarely had more than one tiny room, even two bedrooms and a kitchen were more than a single man needed.
Also surprising to him was the distance to the city. ‘Close to London’ his weird new friend had said. For John, no place more than half an hour from King’s Cross deserved to be called close to London. If he found a job in the city, it would be a pain getting there every day.
Unless the guy also happened to have a car standing around, unneeded and just waiting for John to use it. If that was the case, he would walk away right then and there and never talk to Martin again. No one just happened to have a car to give to virtual strangers.
Just like no one just happened to have spare rooms for a virtual stranger to use for free. John still didn’t understand why he had accepted the offer. He wasn’t that short on money.
What surprised him most when he saw the house - if not to say shocked - was the state of it. He had no idea how much money Martin had, but if it was enough to fly around the world without a care and pay for a taxi all the way from Stansted airport to here, surely there would have been a bit of cash left for a bucket of paint.
The house had two storeys and by the look of it at least one extra room in the attic. It looked rather old, at least a hundred years, and by the look of it, hadn’t seen new paint or even a screwdriver in the last fifty. The surrounding garden was large enough not to make the house look misplaced, overgrown and sadly lacking any big trees to obscure the depressing sight.
It was almost completely dark when they arrived, but somehow even the night didn’t look kindly upon this monster of a building.
“You don’t stay here very often, do you?” It was the most polite thing he could come up with.
Martin just shrugged in response, apparently not seeing how there was anything wrong with his house. He paid the taxi fare, got their bags out of the trunk and then spent five minutes searching through the pockets of his clothes, then the pockets of his bag and eventually the pockets of the clothes in his bag, while John stood in front of the locked door and thought it was probably better if he couldn’t find the key. At least they wouldn’t be inside when the ceiling came down.
On the other hand, the door probably wouldn’t be able to withstand the force of a good, proper kick.
Kicking was unnecessary. Eventually Martin found his key beneath a stone in the garden. If this was his idea of a good hiding place, John would definitely never leave his wallet in the house when he left.
The house had a forth surprise to offer, which came over John upon entering: it looked a lot better on the inside than on the outside. While not a palace, at least it was clean, the furniture intact and the lights working. It was more than he had been daring to hope for.
Also, it was cold. From the temperature alone it was obvious that it had been empty for months.
John’s stomach grumbled. “I don’t suppose you have any frozen food lying around here?” he asked without much hope.
Martin chewed on the inside of his cheeks, staring into the empty air while he thought. “No,” he eventually said. And as an afterthought: “Sorry. I should have thought about that. We could have picked up something on the way.”
“No, I should have thought about it,” John said, acknowledging his own guilt. “The way you look it’s obvious that food isn’t the first thing to cross your mind.”
“I like food. I just happen to be naturally skinny.” Martin’s tone was protesting, but when he looked around the empty house, he had this distant look on his face again, as if he wasn’t really here. He did that sometimes. To John, strangely enough, it was intriguing rather than creepy.
There was something ageless about this man, and in such moments he seemed older than he looked. No wonder that woman had thought him to be middle-aged at least, if she had caught him like this.
Or maybe it was the beard. It was probably supposed to make him appear authoritarian, but thin and fuzzy as it was, it only made him look like a teenager playing adult.
John’s stomach grumbled again. He told it to shut up: no food for you tonight. His stomach was used to this already. Not that John was often lacking the money to buy food, but from time to time he decided that he could do without eating for a day, to save the money just in case he needed it one day.
But hunger seemed to be infectious and Martin’s stomach growled as well.
“We could always order pizza or something,” John offered. “I’ll pay, since you’re letting me stay here and all.”
Martin’s face lit up at the idea, showing the beginning of a smile that was a welcome sight on a face that usually showed a mixture of vague distress and pointless worry. It stirred up something warm in the centre of John’s body that felt like recognition and died when the smile did.
“I don’t have a phone,” Martin admitted, his shoulders slumping in defeat.
“You don’t have a phone,” John repeated. He didn’t have a phone. Of course. “Do you have a radiator at least? It’s freezing in here.” And his damp clothes were beginning to feel rather uncomfortable.
As it turned out there was a radiator. It probably was as old as the rest of the house and made a lot of noise and would take ages to get warm, but at least it existed.
To turn it on, they had to get down into the basement that was as big as could be expected and, naturally, the coldest place in the entire house. Martin showed John how to get it to work, crucial knowledge for anyone intending to stay here until next autumn. John didn’t comment on that, though, but actually memorized the unnecessary information.
The tiny old heaters would never manage to warm up the big rooms with the high ceilings. Unhappily, John tried to get accustomed to the idea that he wouldn’t really be warm again until spring.
He wondered if at least hot water was available in useful amounts.
Eventually, Martin showed him the rooms he could stay in. John had expected the attic, but his host led him to a large bedroom on the second storey. There was a bed inside, a tall closet so deep one could probably walk all the way to Narnia through it, a desk and a chair. It all looked like it hadn’t been used in years, and John wondered whose room this had been, once.
Then he remembered that Martin was unlikely to be the first owner of the building so this room didn’t have to be in any way connected to his past.
The light bulb allowed one brief look on the room and gave up. Martin turned to the connected rooms: one room big and empty except for an old, small kitchen in the corner, and a bathroom with toilet, sink and shower. All this, he said, was John’s to make use of.
“If you want to take a bath, feel free to use the bathroom below. There’s a bathtub.”
The offer was tempting, especially now that John was wet and chilled to the bone. Martin seemed to read his mind.
“Why don’t you take one right now? I need a few minutes to prepare the bedroom for you and to find a new light bulb.”
John wanted to protest that he could very well prepare his room himself, but thought better of it and went down the stairs to look for the bathroom.
The bathroom was cold, but as he slipped out of his shoes and socks, John, to his delight, felt the tiles of the floor warm up. Floor heating. Best invention ever!
In the end, he didn’t quite dare to relax in the bathtub while he still wasn’t quite sure what he had gotten himself into. Instead he took a quick, but hot shower and felt a lot better when he was done, if also very tired.
At least the coldness was mostly gone from his bones. Or so he thought, until he pulled away the shower curtain and was hit by the cold air outside.
Quickly he dried himself with the towel he’d found and slipped into some dry clothes from his bag. Still rubbing the towel through his damp hair, he left the bathroom to drop the towel over the heater and go back upstairs, his bag slung over his shoulder and fatigue pulling at his limbs. All together he hadn’t been gone for even ten minutes, so he expected Martin to be still busy with the room and maybe willing to accept help. He was quite surprised to find everything done by the time he reached the top of the stairs.
The dust was gone. The bed was dressed, the light bulb replaced and even the curtains before the window seemed to have been gone to the washing machine and back in his brief absence. John took in the sight in amazement, and with that amazement came a distant feeling of déjà-vu.
On the bed sat Martin with a gin on his face, like a little boy who’d just found out where the owner of the sweets store was hiding his keys.
He didn’t linger for much longer though, and John was glad, for suddenly Martin’s presence was making him feel uncomfortable. It wasn’t even a bad feeling he gave him, but it was making him nervous, because he couldn’t name it, and because it made him feel like there was something he very badly needed to do, and he didn’t know what it was. The urge had no direction.
A minute after Martin had bid him good night, John went to his own little bathroom to brush his teeth, and found that it, too, had much improved since he’d first seen it. He ended up staring into the perfectly clean mirror, taking in his face that looked younger than he felt right now, the damp strands of hair that needed to be cut, the shadows around his eyes, and needed almost five minutes before he realised he was doing it.
The walls were thin here. John could hear Martin rummaging about below, and when he crouched down over his bag to find his night clothes, he even dimly heard him sing a few lines of a very, very old song. The man appeared to be in surprisingly good cheer, considering he had to be at least as hungry as his guest was.
John rolled his eyes at the sound, while his lips stubbornly curled into a smile. His searching fingers came in contact with his mobile - he had almost forgotten the thing existed, and here it was, offering the solution to at least one of his problems.
A brief call and a visit to the staircase later, John set the alarm of his mobile and crawled under the covers, to find them cold against his clam skin. Tired as he was, even that didn’t bother him anymore. Only distantly, before drifting away, did he wish he could do Martin’s trick with the cigarettes and apply it to the bedding. That would have been really neat…
-
Merlin had forgotten to make his bed before he left. It waited in his bedroom in the same unruly state he had left it in and caused him to stare at it for a good five minutes, wondering how he could have let his mental state deteriorate so far that he would forget the most basic of tasks without even realising it.
Probably his mind had blinded it out because if hadn’t seemed worth the effort. Nothing had seemed worth the effort of doing it for a while, and now everything was there again and he was doing it consciously and gladly - even breathing. He was alive. He hadn’t even realised he hadn’t been before.
The sight of his bed wasn’t very inviting, but he didn’t feel like sleeping anyway. On most nights, sleeping was just a way to pass the time. Tonight he was too excited to even think about it.
He had gotten Arthur back to Albion. Somehow he felt like he had accomplished something important.
Turning his back to the unmade bed, Merlin restlessly wandered through the house and ended up in the kitchen. Despite his staring intently into the frying pan sitting abandoned on the hot plate, food stubbornly refused to appear.
Merlin didn’t need food, technically, because he couldn’t starve. That didn’t mean that he didn’t like food, and right now he very much wanted it. Stupid Arthur. If he hadn’t mentioned it, Merlin probably wouldn’t even have noticed his own burning hunger.
Arthur had to be at least as hungry as Merlin, and he needed food. Probably. Even considering Arthur’s magical nature, it probably would have been asking for too much to have him be just as immortal as Merlin, this time.
Come on, Merlin urged his magic. It’s for Arthur. You like Arthur. You can work for him if not for me! His magic remained dormant, its earlier brief outbreak forgotten. Merlin would have pouted at it, had it had any corporal form to pout at. As it was, he pouted at the frying pan.
It was still chilly in here. Upstairs too - Merlin thought of Arthur’s damp hair and remembered all the times he had heated up the room for him when his price came back from patrols in the rain. It was so long ago, and yet it felt like yesterday, because all the time in between didn’t matter.
If Morgana had been right, Arthur had returned for a reason. He had to do something, and Merlin thought it would be nice if the powers that had brought him back would make sure he wouldn’t die of starvation or hypothermia before he could do whatever it was.
But somehow he got the feeling that this was, once again, his job.
Unfortunately he didn’t have a glorious history in fulfilling it. After all, Merlin had already failed spectacularly in making Arthur survive to do what, in Merlin’s humble opinion, he very badly needed to do: die of old age.
The doorbell ringing saved him from the dark path his thoughts threatened to wander down. Confused about the fact that someone came here at his hour (or at all), and at the fact that he had a doorbell, Merlin opened the front door - remembering too late that his visitor might be an enemy, a potential threat to Arthur’s life.
Outside a delivery boy was standing in the rain, holding a pizza box.
Once they had determined that this was indeed the right address, Merlin paid for the food and puzzled but happily took it inside. Arthur had to have ordered it, via the supernatural way of telepathy, time travel or a mobile phone. Then Merlin realised that this was but one pizza, and Arthur probably wanted it for himself. The selfish prat. Wasn’t this just typical? His hunger strengthened but his good cheer gone, Merlin scowled at the offending box, and decided to have a slice anyway before Arthur came down to get it.
There was a lot of cheese on it. He’d always loved cheese.
Two slices later, there still was no sign of Arthur. Perhaps he hadn’t heard the bell. With a heavy, regretful sigh, Merlin decided to get him.
On the last step of the stairs, he found an envelope with his name on it and the exact amount of money he’d paid for the pizza inside. In Arthur’s room, he found the boy in bed, sleeping the deep sleep of the just and the, well, tired.
Accepting that this was Arthur’s way of being nice, Merlin considered returning the money to where he found it. In the end he decided to keep it and never mention this again, knowing anything else would only piss Arthur off. He returned to his living room and ate the rest of the pizza only to realize, too late, that this meant there was nothing left for breakfast. If he wanted to feed his guest, some early morning shopping could not be avoided.
-
Shopping in a super market wasn’t quite like searching for mushrooms for Gaius. Merlin had found that out a long time ago, but sometimes the fact that here he found mushrooms in plastic boxes and had to pay for them still amazed him.
It also amazed him that super markets weren’t open twenty-four hours a day. Merlin left at the first hint of dawn to be back when Arthur woke up and found he wouldn’t have needed to hurry. The forest had never confronted him with closed doors.
(Except for the one that was cursed and tried to eat him. But even that had happened only once.)
While he waited for the store to open, Merlin killed some time with an old game of his. It was called “Plotting the Violent Demise of Thomas Malory” and had survived itself by several centuries by now.
From time to time over the years, Merlin had been overcome by a kind of curious frustration and gone to the food stores to buy everything he didn’t know. Apart from that, the food he bought was usually divided in two categories: edible and not edible. This was the first time in ages he chose his food by things like taste and nutritional value.
He also brought home a few new towels, various sorts of tea, and another set of bed sheets. Arthur would be annoyed if he found out Merlin had bought these things extra for him, so he‘d have to smuggle them into the cupboards without his guest noticing and claim they had been there all along.
It was funny how things changed with the circumstances; in the days of Camelot, Arthur had been used to things being bought or made especially for him.
But even then he hadn’t expected of his servants to pay for them with their own money.
When he got home, the sound of running water greeted Merlin. Apparently his guest was just doing his morning washing. Having grown up in a farmer’s village with freezing winters and dry summers, Merlin had never really understood Arthur’s obsession with being clean, but even he had come to appreciate the benefits of hot showers - and he knew that in this time and place, people didn’t like it if someone stank.
By the time Arthur came down fully dressed and apparently ready to leave the house, Merlin had prepared two plentiful breakfasts and was sitting at the table, reading the newspaper he’d bought. It occurred to him that this looked very, very domestic. And very familiar. In the old days they had often shared their dinner, as Arthur preferred Merlin’s company over that of his fellow noblemen any day.
Or course, Arthur didn’t know that anymore.
Right now, Arthur eyed the food on the table as if he desperately wanted it but wasn’t sure it was really for him. There was no one else the second plate could be for, and yet he waited until Merlin called him over. It was so odd. Sometimes Arthur seemed to forget that he didn’t know who he really was, and sometimes he was like a stranger.
He is a stranger, the annoying part of Merlin’s mind reminded him. Try to remember that once in a while.
Once he had decided to eat, however, Arthur wolfed down the eggs, toast and bacon like he hadn’t eaten in a week. Merlin watched with a slight smirk and was going to attack his own plate, when a picture in the newspaper caught his eye.
There was nothing remarkable about it. It was black and white, as pictures in newspapers tended to be, showing a man in a suit standing in front of something that looked terribly technical. The man was wearing glasses, his hair was dark, but beginning to turn grey, and he was smiling the self-satisfied smile of someone who knew things were going well. It had to be this smile, Merlin decided, that seemed so familiar to him, because he was certain he had never seen that man before.
Well, he had seen many, many kinds of smiles and faces in his lifetime, so usually he saw someone familiar-looking at every corner. Merlin, who had grown used to ignoring it, didn’t understand why this one disturbed him so much. He found it hard to take his eyes off the picture, while staring at it made his skin itch.
According to the article the photo belonged to, the man was a scientist from Cardiff, who was involved in the development of a new kind of radio telescope, or something like that. Apparently it was quite impressive, but it failed to hold Merlin’s interest, once he had determined that there was nothing wrong with this guy and this was just his recent oversensitivity speaking.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked Arthur.
“Uhm.” Arthur nodded while chewing his food. After swallowing the last bit, he asked, “Is there a bus going to the city stopping anywhere around here?”
“What do you want in the city?” Merlin frowned. The house was full of food, outside it was raining again, and there was nothing around that needed killing, at least to his knowledge. There was no reason for Arthur to leave the house.
Only when Arthur returned his confused stare with a look of equal confusion did Merlin realise he had once again lost touch with reality.
“I’m looking for a job,” Arthur said, speaking slowly and clearly. “So I can earn money. Normal people need money to live.”
“Yes, thanks, I had forgotten that,” Merlin said sourly. “Because, you see, I’m an idiot living in a cave.”
“And who thinks that the middle of nowhere deserves to be called ‘close to London’.”
“We’re closer to London than any other city.”
“If by ‘city’ you mean a place with more than two million inhabitants, yes.” Arthur drank the last of his tea. “So, is there a bus going there, or do I have to walk?”
Merlin consulted his memory. “I don’t think there’s a bus stopping anywhere near here,” he admitted. “But I don’t plan on going anywhere else today, so you could use my car.”
Merlin expected Arthur to happily accept the offer. Instead the boy leaned back, closed his eyes and sat very still for a moment. Then, without further comment, he got up and walked out of the room, muttering something under his breath that sounded a little like ‘I don’t fucking believe it.’
Merlin stared after him, puzzled. “Or,” he offered, “If you don’t have a driver’s license, I could always give you a ride.”
Somehow, that didn’t really seem to help.
- tbc
May 9, 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.
One would think that having lived through the entire development of motorized vehicles, Merlin would have a general idea of how far and how fast they could travel. The opposite was the case; Merlin blamed it on the fact that he had spent a few centuries in a disinterested haze while most things passed though his mind without leaving a lingering impression. When the first car had been invented he’d been curious, when man managed to fly for the first time he’d been at the same time impressed, wistful and hopeful - but every further step on the way to modern airplanes had just been something that happened, somewhere, and had nothing to do with him.
Merlin had been able to fly, once. He could turn into a falcon and soar the sky or ride on dragons and griffins. Modern technology, he found, couldn’t take him back there. It simply didn’t feel real enough.
So, despite having made the same trip dozens of times before (the first time in a Saxon longboat), Merlin still was surprised when the plane started to sink not long after having started. Beside him, Arthur was ignoring Merlin’s presence with silent determination, either reading the science fiction novel he had bought for the flight or gazing out of the window. The light of the setting sun reflected in his eyes when he did that, making them shine. The sights outside seemed to fascinate him.
“Excuse me,” the woman sitting on the seat beside Merlin said with an accentuation to her words that spoke of schoolbook English. She had been rummaging through her handbag for the last five minutes, and now it seemed she had given up her search for whatever she was looking for. “Do you happen to have a handkerchief?” She sniffed. “I can’t seem to find mine.”
Merlin knew he had none, but patted his pockets anyway, out of politeness - no one could say he didn’t at least try. “Sorry. Usually I have some with me, but today I’m wearing the wrong jacket.”
The woman looked at him as if it was a crime against humanity not to have handkerchiefs at the ready, the old hypocrite. “What about your son?”
Merlin was still trying to relate her words to the here and now when she half leaned over him to poke Arthur’s arm. “Excuse me, would you happen to have a handkerchief?”
Arthur turned to look at the woman, and Merlin, his mouth hanging open in speechlessness, turned to look at Arthur, just in time to see the last traces of a grin disappear behind a mask of indifferent innocence. “Of course I do,” he said. “Just a second.” He quickly searched through the pockets of his jean jacket to produce a box of Tempos and hand it to the lady. “Here you go.”
“He’s not my son,” Merlin burst out, disbelief still evident in his voice. He didn’t look that old, did he? What a silly assumption!
It made him feel slightly perverted.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” the woman exclaimed in between blowing her nose. “It’s just, I saw you talking earlier, and I assumed you belonged together. But now you mention it, you look nothing like each other.”
“I got my looks from my mother’s side of the family,” Arthur mentioned what he couldn’t know was true. He grinned in a way only Merlin could identify as evil. “But really, do I look like thirty to you?” Conspiratorially leaning over to the woman, he stage whispered, “He’s my grandfather.”
“Who, despite his very old age, isn’t deaf yet,” Merlin mentioned dryly. “And who, as your legal guardian, can ground you for life if you don’t shut up this second.”
Arthur leaned back. “I better do as he says,” he said apologetically. “He’s very strict.”
No further word was spoken between them until the plane landed, but silently was Merlin still fuming. Of course it was impossible to say at what age exactly he’d stopped aging, but he was convinced that it wasn’t long after Arthur had died - not that he had paid much attention to his appearance at that time. There was no way he looked any older than thirty-five, his vanity assured him, and while there was still the chance of him having impregnated some girl as a teenager, it definitely wasn’t the obvious conclusion, in his opinion. Why didn’t that woman just assume that they were friends travelling together, or student and teacher or something?
Or lovers?
Because this century has still got a stick up its arse long enough to come out of its mouth, that’s why, the realistic part of his mind whispered. And because he looks half your age and anyone suspecting you to be in a sexual relationship would call the police.
Not for the first time Merlin wished Arthur had come back two or three years earlier so he’d have been older when Merlin found him. It wouldn’t make a difference for the several centuries wide age gab between them, but it would have looked better.
Don’t worry, his mind whispered again. Soon he’ll look your age. And then he’ll look older, and older, and eventually he’ll die. If he survives long enough this time, that is. Merlin hated his mind with a passion.
-
The sunset above the clouds, as far as Merlin could see it, had been beautiful. Peaceful and calm, the kind of magic open for everyone. Getting out of the plane was like entering a different dimension since the clouds were a lot less charming from below. On the other side they had glowed red and yellow and purple in the fading sunlight. From this side they were just grey.
“Welcome to England,” Arthur muttered when they stepped out of the hall and into the soft, cold rain. “Tell me again why I wanted to come back here.”
“You never told me,” Merlin said, adding: “Do you even know?”
For a second Arthur looked confused, as if he really didn’t know. Destiny, the bloody dragon whispered in Merlin’s memory, as if he had found shelter there before disappearing like all the other creatures of old.
Then Arthur shook off his confusion. “Whatever the reason, I’m sure it wasn’t the weather,” he said carelessly.
There were enough taxis standing around for them not to have to wait. It was unusual, as far as Merlin could recall, but this he believed to be simply luck - even at his most powerful, his magic wouldn’t have had power over taxi drivers.
Inside, he gave the driver the address of Martin Rogers, unknown millionaire (or was it billionaire? He hadn’t really looked at his bank account since eighteen sixty-three.) and unemployed hermit. Merlin hadn’t used his real name since he had, a few years ago, found “Merlin Emrys” on a website called “The 100 Most Stupid Names Found in the British Phone Book”.
The name tasted as alien on his tongue as Arthur’s current one did. He’d never felt like Martin Rogers, but since Martin Rogers had no friends, not many people addressed him with this name and it wasn’t much of a problem.
-
The house they arrived at, eventually, was not exactly what John had expected. For one, it was large. Good, Martin had told him it had more rooms than a bachelor really had use for, but for John, who had spend the past few years living in flats that rarely had more than one tiny room, even two bedrooms and a kitchen were more than a single man needed.
Also surprising to him was the distance to the city. ‘Close to London’ his weird new friend had said. For John, no place more than half an hour from King’s Cross deserved to be called close to London. If he found a job in the city, it would be a pain getting there every day.
Unless the guy also happened to have a car standing around, unneeded and just waiting for John to use it. If that was the case, he would walk away right then and there and never talk to Martin again. No one just happened to have a car to give to virtual strangers.
Just like no one just happened to have spare rooms for a virtual stranger to use for free. John still didn’t understand why he had accepted the offer. He wasn’t that short on money.
What surprised him most when he saw the house - if not to say shocked - was the state of it. He had no idea how much money Martin had, but if it was enough to fly around the world without a care and pay for a taxi all the way from Stansted airport to here, surely there would have been a bit of cash left for a bucket of paint.
The house had two storeys and by the look of it at least one extra room in the attic. It looked rather old, at least a hundred years, and by the look of it, hadn’t seen new paint or even a screwdriver in the last fifty. The surrounding garden was large enough not to make the house look misplaced, overgrown and sadly lacking any big trees to obscure the depressing sight.
It was almost completely dark when they arrived, but somehow even the night didn’t look kindly upon this monster of a building.
“You don’t stay here very often, do you?” It was the most polite thing he could come up with.
Martin just shrugged in response, apparently not seeing how there was anything wrong with his house. He paid the taxi fare, got their bags out of the trunk and then spent five minutes searching through the pockets of his clothes, then the pockets of his bag and eventually the pockets of the clothes in his bag, while John stood in front of the locked door and thought it was probably better if he couldn’t find the key. At least they wouldn’t be inside when the ceiling came down.
On the other hand, the door probably wouldn’t be able to withstand the force of a good, proper kick.
Kicking was unnecessary. Eventually Martin found his key beneath a stone in the garden. If this was his idea of a good hiding place, John would definitely never leave his wallet in the house when he left.
The house had a forth surprise to offer, which came over John upon entering: it looked a lot better on the inside than on the outside. While not a palace, at least it was clean, the furniture intact and the lights working. It was more than he had been daring to hope for.
Also, it was cold. From the temperature alone it was obvious that it had been empty for months.
John’s stomach grumbled. “I don’t suppose you have any frozen food lying around here?” he asked without much hope.
Martin chewed on the inside of his cheeks, staring into the empty air while he thought. “No,” he eventually said. And as an afterthought: “Sorry. I should have thought about that. We could have picked up something on the way.”
“No, I should have thought about it,” John said, acknowledging his own guilt. “The way you look it’s obvious that food isn’t the first thing to cross your mind.”
“I like food. I just happen to be naturally skinny.” Martin’s tone was protesting, but when he looked around the empty house, he had this distant look on his face again, as if he wasn’t really here. He did that sometimes. To John, strangely enough, it was intriguing rather than creepy.
There was something ageless about this man, and in such moments he seemed older than he looked. No wonder that woman had thought him to be middle-aged at least, if she had caught him like this.
Or maybe it was the beard. It was probably supposed to make him appear authoritarian, but thin and fuzzy as it was, it only made him look like a teenager playing adult.
John’s stomach grumbled again. He told it to shut up: no food for you tonight. His stomach was used to this already. Not that John was often lacking the money to buy food, but from time to time he decided that he could do without eating for a day, to save the money just in case he needed it one day.
But hunger seemed to be infectious and Martin’s stomach growled as well.
“We could always order pizza or something,” John offered. “I’ll pay, since you’re letting me stay here and all.”
Martin’s face lit up at the idea, showing the beginning of a smile that was a welcome sight on a face that usually showed a mixture of vague distress and pointless worry. It stirred up something warm in the centre of John’s body that felt like recognition and died when the smile did.
“I don’t have a phone,” Martin admitted, his shoulders slumping in defeat.
“You don’t have a phone,” John repeated. He didn’t have a phone. Of course. “Do you have a radiator at least? It’s freezing in here.” And his damp clothes were beginning to feel rather uncomfortable.
As it turned out there was a radiator. It probably was as old as the rest of the house and made a lot of noise and would take ages to get warm, but at least it existed.
To turn it on, they had to get down into the basement that was as big as could be expected and, naturally, the coldest place in the entire house. Martin showed John how to get it to work, crucial knowledge for anyone intending to stay here until next autumn. John didn’t comment on that, though, but actually memorized the unnecessary information.
The tiny old heaters would never manage to warm up the big rooms with the high ceilings. Unhappily, John tried to get accustomed to the idea that he wouldn’t really be warm again until spring.
He wondered if at least hot water was available in useful amounts.
Eventually, Martin showed him the rooms he could stay in. John had expected the attic, but his host led him to a large bedroom on the second storey. There was a bed inside, a tall closet so deep one could probably walk all the way to Narnia through it, a desk and a chair. It all looked like it hadn’t been used in years, and John wondered whose room this had been, once.
Then he remembered that Martin was unlikely to be the first owner of the building so this room didn’t have to be in any way connected to his past.
The light bulb allowed one brief look on the room and gave up. Martin turned to the connected rooms: one room big and empty except for an old, small kitchen in the corner, and a bathroom with toilet, sink and shower. All this, he said, was John’s to make use of.
“If you want to take a bath, feel free to use the bathroom below. There’s a bathtub.”
The offer was tempting, especially now that John was wet and chilled to the bone. Martin seemed to read his mind.
“Why don’t you take one right now? I need a few minutes to prepare the bedroom for you and to find a new light bulb.”
John wanted to protest that he could very well prepare his room himself, but thought better of it and went down the stairs to look for the bathroom.
The bathroom was cold, but as he slipped out of his shoes and socks, John, to his delight, felt the tiles of the floor warm up. Floor heating. Best invention ever!
In the end, he didn’t quite dare to relax in the bathtub while he still wasn’t quite sure what he had gotten himself into. Instead he took a quick, but hot shower and felt a lot better when he was done, if also very tired.
At least the coldness was mostly gone from his bones. Or so he thought, until he pulled away the shower curtain and was hit by the cold air outside.
Quickly he dried himself with the towel he’d found and slipped into some dry clothes from his bag. Still rubbing the towel through his damp hair, he left the bathroom to drop the towel over the heater and go back upstairs, his bag slung over his shoulder and fatigue pulling at his limbs. All together he hadn’t been gone for even ten minutes, so he expected Martin to be still busy with the room and maybe willing to accept help. He was quite surprised to find everything done by the time he reached the top of the stairs.
The dust was gone. The bed was dressed, the light bulb replaced and even the curtains before the window seemed to have been gone to the washing machine and back in his brief absence. John took in the sight in amazement, and with that amazement came a distant feeling of déjà-vu.
On the bed sat Martin with a gin on his face, like a little boy who’d just found out where the owner of the sweets store was hiding his keys.
He didn’t linger for much longer though, and John was glad, for suddenly Martin’s presence was making him feel uncomfortable. It wasn’t even a bad feeling he gave him, but it was making him nervous, because he couldn’t name it, and because it made him feel like there was something he very badly needed to do, and he didn’t know what it was. The urge had no direction.
A minute after Martin had bid him good night, John went to his own little bathroom to brush his teeth, and found that it, too, had much improved since he’d first seen it. He ended up staring into the perfectly clean mirror, taking in his face that looked younger than he felt right now, the damp strands of hair that needed to be cut, the shadows around his eyes, and needed almost five minutes before he realised he was doing it.
The walls were thin here. John could hear Martin rummaging about below, and when he crouched down over his bag to find his night clothes, he even dimly heard him sing a few lines of a very, very old song. The man appeared to be in surprisingly good cheer, considering he had to be at least as hungry as his guest was.
John rolled his eyes at the sound, while his lips stubbornly curled into a smile. His searching fingers came in contact with his mobile - he had almost forgotten the thing existed, and here it was, offering the solution to at least one of his problems.
A brief call and a visit to the staircase later, John set the alarm of his mobile and crawled under the covers, to find them cold against his clam skin. Tired as he was, even that didn’t bother him anymore. Only distantly, before drifting away, did he wish he could do Martin’s trick with the cigarettes and apply it to the bedding. That would have been really neat…
-
Merlin had forgotten to make his bed before he left. It waited in his bedroom in the same unruly state he had left it in and caused him to stare at it for a good five minutes, wondering how he could have let his mental state deteriorate so far that he would forget the most basic of tasks without even realising it.
Probably his mind had blinded it out because if hadn’t seemed worth the effort. Nothing had seemed worth the effort of doing it for a while, and now everything was there again and he was doing it consciously and gladly - even breathing. He was alive. He hadn’t even realised he hadn’t been before.
The sight of his bed wasn’t very inviting, but he didn’t feel like sleeping anyway. On most nights, sleeping was just a way to pass the time. Tonight he was too excited to even think about it.
He had gotten Arthur back to Albion. Somehow he felt like he had accomplished something important.
Turning his back to the unmade bed, Merlin restlessly wandered through the house and ended up in the kitchen. Despite his staring intently into the frying pan sitting abandoned on the hot plate, food stubbornly refused to appear.
Merlin didn’t need food, technically, because he couldn’t starve. That didn’t mean that he didn’t like food, and right now he very much wanted it. Stupid Arthur. If he hadn’t mentioned it, Merlin probably wouldn’t even have noticed his own burning hunger.
Arthur had to be at least as hungry as Merlin, and he needed food. Probably. Even considering Arthur’s magical nature, it probably would have been asking for too much to have him be just as immortal as Merlin, this time.
Come on, Merlin urged his magic. It’s for Arthur. You like Arthur. You can work for him if not for me! His magic remained dormant, its earlier brief outbreak forgotten. Merlin would have pouted at it, had it had any corporal form to pout at. As it was, he pouted at the frying pan.
It was still chilly in here. Upstairs too - Merlin thought of Arthur’s damp hair and remembered all the times he had heated up the room for him when his price came back from patrols in the rain. It was so long ago, and yet it felt like yesterday, because all the time in between didn’t matter.
If Morgana had been right, Arthur had returned for a reason. He had to do something, and Merlin thought it would be nice if the powers that had brought him back would make sure he wouldn’t die of starvation or hypothermia before he could do whatever it was.
But somehow he got the feeling that this was, once again, his job.
Unfortunately he didn’t have a glorious history in fulfilling it. After all, Merlin had already failed spectacularly in making Arthur survive to do what, in Merlin’s humble opinion, he very badly needed to do: die of old age.
The doorbell ringing saved him from the dark path his thoughts threatened to wander down. Confused about the fact that someone came here at his hour (or at all), and at the fact that he had a doorbell, Merlin opened the front door - remembering too late that his visitor might be an enemy, a potential threat to Arthur’s life.
Outside a delivery boy was standing in the rain, holding a pizza box.
Once they had determined that this was indeed the right address, Merlin paid for the food and puzzled but happily took it inside. Arthur had to have ordered it, via the supernatural way of telepathy, time travel or a mobile phone. Then Merlin realised that this was but one pizza, and Arthur probably wanted it for himself. The selfish prat. Wasn’t this just typical? His hunger strengthened but his good cheer gone, Merlin scowled at the offending box, and decided to have a slice anyway before Arthur came down to get it.
There was a lot of cheese on it. He’d always loved cheese.
Two slices later, there still was no sign of Arthur. Perhaps he hadn’t heard the bell. With a heavy, regretful sigh, Merlin decided to get him.
On the last step of the stairs, he found an envelope with his name on it and the exact amount of money he’d paid for the pizza inside. In Arthur’s room, he found the boy in bed, sleeping the deep sleep of the just and the, well, tired.
Accepting that this was Arthur’s way of being nice, Merlin considered returning the money to where he found it. In the end he decided to keep it and never mention this again, knowing anything else would only piss Arthur off. He returned to his living room and ate the rest of the pizza only to realize, too late, that this meant there was nothing left for breakfast. If he wanted to feed his guest, some early morning shopping could not be avoided.
-
Shopping in a super market wasn’t quite like searching for mushrooms for Gaius. Merlin had found that out a long time ago, but sometimes the fact that here he found mushrooms in plastic boxes and had to pay for them still amazed him.
It also amazed him that super markets weren’t open twenty-four hours a day. Merlin left at the first hint of dawn to be back when Arthur woke up and found he wouldn’t have needed to hurry. The forest had never confronted him with closed doors.
(Except for the one that was cursed and tried to eat him. But even that had happened only once.)
While he waited for the store to open, Merlin killed some time with an old game of his. It was called “Plotting the Violent Demise of Thomas Malory” and had survived itself by several centuries by now.
From time to time over the years, Merlin had been overcome by a kind of curious frustration and gone to the food stores to buy everything he didn’t know. Apart from that, the food he bought was usually divided in two categories: edible and not edible. This was the first time in ages he chose his food by things like taste and nutritional value.
He also brought home a few new towels, various sorts of tea, and another set of bed sheets. Arthur would be annoyed if he found out Merlin had bought these things extra for him, so he‘d have to smuggle them into the cupboards without his guest noticing and claim they had been there all along.
It was funny how things changed with the circumstances; in the days of Camelot, Arthur had been used to things being bought or made especially for him.
But even then he hadn’t expected of his servants to pay for them with their own money.
When he got home, the sound of running water greeted Merlin. Apparently his guest was just doing his morning washing. Having grown up in a farmer’s village with freezing winters and dry summers, Merlin had never really understood Arthur’s obsession with being clean, but even he had come to appreciate the benefits of hot showers - and he knew that in this time and place, people didn’t like it if someone stank.
By the time Arthur came down fully dressed and apparently ready to leave the house, Merlin had prepared two plentiful breakfasts and was sitting at the table, reading the newspaper he’d bought. It occurred to him that this looked very, very domestic. And very familiar. In the old days they had often shared their dinner, as Arthur preferred Merlin’s company over that of his fellow noblemen any day.
Or course, Arthur didn’t know that anymore.
Right now, Arthur eyed the food on the table as if he desperately wanted it but wasn’t sure it was really for him. There was no one else the second plate could be for, and yet he waited until Merlin called him over. It was so odd. Sometimes Arthur seemed to forget that he didn’t know who he really was, and sometimes he was like a stranger.
He is a stranger, the annoying part of Merlin’s mind reminded him. Try to remember that once in a while.
Once he had decided to eat, however, Arthur wolfed down the eggs, toast and bacon like he hadn’t eaten in a week. Merlin watched with a slight smirk and was going to attack his own plate, when a picture in the newspaper caught his eye.
There was nothing remarkable about it. It was black and white, as pictures in newspapers tended to be, showing a man in a suit standing in front of something that looked terribly technical. The man was wearing glasses, his hair was dark, but beginning to turn grey, and he was smiling the self-satisfied smile of someone who knew things were going well. It had to be this smile, Merlin decided, that seemed so familiar to him, because he was certain he had never seen that man before.
Well, he had seen many, many kinds of smiles and faces in his lifetime, so usually he saw someone familiar-looking at every corner. Merlin, who had grown used to ignoring it, didn’t understand why this one disturbed him so much. He found it hard to take his eyes off the picture, while staring at it made his skin itch.
According to the article the photo belonged to, the man was a scientist from Cardiff, who was involved in the development of a new kind of radio telescope, or something like that. Apparently it was quite impressive, but it failed to hold Merlin’s interest, once he had determined that there was nothing wrong with this guy and this was just his recent oversensitivity speaking.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked Arthur.
“Uhm.” Arthur nodded while chewing his food. After swallowing the last bit, he asked, “Is there a bus going to the city stopping anywhere around here?”
“What do you want in the city?” Merlin frowned. The house was full of food, outside it was raining again, and there was nothing around that needed killing, at least to his knowledge. There was no reason for Arthur to leave the house.
Only when Arthur returned his confused stare with a look of equal confusion did Merlin realise he had once again lost touch with reality.
“I’m looking for a job,” Arthur said, speaking slowly and clearly. “So I can earn money. Normal people need money to live.”
“Yes, thanks, I had forgotten that,” Merlin said sourly. “Because, you see, I’m an idiot living in a cave.”
“And who thinks that the middle of nowhere deserves to be called ‘close to London’.”
“We’re closer to London than any other city.”
“If by ‘city’ you mean a place with more than two million inhabitants, yes.” Arthur drank the last of his tea. “So, is there a bus going there, or do I have to walk?”
Merlin consulted his memory. “I don’t think there’s a bus stopping anywhere near here,” he admitted. “But I don’t plan on going anywhere else today, so you could use my car.”
Merlin expected Arthur to happily accept the offer. Instead the boy leaned back, closed his eyes and sat very still for a moment. Then, without further comment, he got up and walked out of the room, muttering something under his breath that sounded a little like ‘I don’t fucking believe it.’
Merlin stared after him, puzzled. “Or,” he offered, “If you don’t have a driver’s license, I could always give you a ride.”
Somehow, that didn’t really seem to help.
- tbc
May 9, 2009