fic: the world forgetting, by the world forgot - part 2
title: the world forgetting, by the world forgot
film prompt: eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
characters/pairings: merlin, arthur, morgana, gwen (main); merlin/arthur (main); everyone/everyone on the side
rating: pg-13
| part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 | part 8 | part 9 | part 10 | part 11 | part 12 | part 13 | part 14 | part 15 | part 16 |
*
|►merlin|
He spends far too much time at the record store, especially after hours, and especially in the listening booth.
He wonders sometimes if it’s possible to turn the music all the way up until it takes away his hearing. He knows it's silly, knows it has to be, and Gaius has given him long and drawn-out speeches all his life about kids today and how this generation will suffer from hearing loss collectively at the age of thirty anyway given their rock concerts and earphone-mania and such. Merlin's not generally one for self-destruction only that sometimes the curiosity sort of runs wild.
There is that and the fact that something else is going on here, here being his head. No, he's (usually) pretty sure he's not crazy or heading in that direction but there are moments when headaches take on a life of their own, forming a throbbing pulse of sorts that grows louder until he can feel something like a crackle, like static in clothing fresh from the dryer. And when he can practically hear the tiny shocks fire in quick succession, he has to reconsider a lot of the logic behind his sanity.
The sounds are just that for the most part and they tend to follow a pattern, getting a bit louder and more intense if he's in a particularly crappy mood. Other times, they come out of nowhere and he has to make a bit of an effort at not being entirely terrified then. It’s as if something inside him wants out, cries out, all suffocation and impatience, and he has to press against it, apply pressure as if to a bleeding wound, thinking, no you don’t.
*
He spends the next few days trying to piece it together by himself.
There is no absolutely no way he’s telling Gaius because he knows that Gaius would pull out his DSM so fast and Merlin knows his chances when it comes to that. Moreover, he has read enough about antipsychotics and, long story short, they scare him half to death; meds in general do. He's had an unfriendly relationship with them from as far back as he can remember, so thanks but no thanks, and he will be avoiding any medical advice that screws with his brain chemistry like the plague.
The thing with thinking it through on his own is that it requires the kind of effort his mind is not willing to supply, not now and not for some time to come. He tries for ignorance then, lets himself be pulled into the exhaustion of being on his feet at the record store most days. Later, other things serve as distractions, like late nights with Will watching Harold and Kumar on their trek to Whitecastle, or watching Gwen at work, deft fingers stringing metal clasps and beads together for her friends or the flea market. Other days, the music helps, replacing the pulse in his head with its own so long as it's loud and furious and absolutely relentless. There are days where he believes it to be genuinely more potent than the ibuprofen.
*
He manages to kill his days like this until one Sunday evening. Merlin's getting ready to close up shop for the day when a customer walks in looking nothing like their usual clientele.
He's all broad shoulders and golden hair, red dress-shirt and black dinner jacket, and Merlin is maybe a little bit fixated on the line of his jaw, or the glimpses he manages to catch of it from between the revolving shelves at the other end of the store. The man seems to shuffle around from genre to genre, finally settling on something from the store's very small Top 40 section. The fact that they have it at all is really all on Freya. Nimueh had gone along with it to boost sales since they were the only music store for miles. Classy businesswoman that she was, she'd proposed that they may as well reap the benefits and it wasn't up to Merlin to protest.
By the time the man comes to the check-out counter, Merlin's eyes are nowhere near the counter itself and he wants to hit himself for it a little. He can swear he's going to make a complete and utter fool of himself with this transaction, probably by hitting the VISA key instead of Debit or something, which is pretty much what he tends to do when he is facing anything resembling ridiculously attractive strangers at work.
It is fortunate, however, that this one manages to spare him the embarrassment because the stranger ceases to be ridiculously attractive the instant he opens his mouth to speak.
*
|►arthur|
“For a music store,” Arthur looks around, “the music here is surprisingly difficult to find.”
The guy at the cash counter rings out Arthur with a light, thinly-veiled snort at the album as if to say Hillary Duff? Really? “Most of our customers seem to manage just fine.”
"It's a gift," Arthur counters gruffly and maybe a little unnecessarily, but it is. It's for Lance's niece because she's turning ten, and Arthur’s pretty sure that ten is too young to question a kid's taste in music.
The sales guy seems to think differently because as the bill prints, he's giving Arthur the kind of look that makes him fight the urge to say something petty and defensive. He should not need to justify his purchases to a guy named-he practically laughs out loud at the sight of the name-tag-Merlin.
"So tell me, Merlin," he means to match his tone with a sneer but can’t quite manage it. The combination of big ears and even bigger headphones around a pale neck covered with threads and cords of every colour to ever exist stops him in his tracks. Arthur can feel his face twisting into what he’s pretty sure is a gaping motion of the I-don't-even-know-where-to-begin-with-you variety as he tries to not feel too affronted by the chaotic display of, well, person, before him. He grinds out, "What would you suggest for a ten year old girl on her birthday?"
"Someone in her life with better taste in music for starters.” The guy is quite obviously biting back a smirk as he places the paper-bagged CD on the counter. “We usually leave tween pop to Target and the like. I’m surprised we even carry this. Probably Freya again,” he mutters, and Arthur knows he shouldn't even bother to ask. Still, this is just bad marketing.
“Are you actively trying to put this store out of business?” Arthur taps his fingers against the counter top, waiting to get his credit card and his bill and be out of this ridiculous place with its ridiculous paper bags and even more ridiculous sales staff. He’s pretty sure being a music snob is part of the job description in these dingy indie record stores but he’d never thought that being so irritatingly judgmental of the customers (not to mention of the merchandise they were buying from your store) was also on the list. “At any rate, I have somewhere to be and getting there today would be nice.” Whatever this Merlin fellow mumbles after that is barely audible and totally lost on him.
Their fingers brush when he hands Arthur his credit card bill and a pen to sign it with, and Arthur catches a glint of silver on his wrist, peeking out from below the sleeve of the first of many layers. Arthur swears it’s shaped like a tiny lightning bolt but given the rest of this guy’s get-up, it shouldn’t be all that surprising. The momentary distraction does not make him miss the flickering of the lights overhead. Sliding the receipt and the pen back over the counter, he grabs his own copy and, quirking a thumb upwards, says, “Maintenance. Might want to get on that,” and he makes his exit too fast to catch the scowl that's inevitably coming his way.
________________________________
|►gwen|
Blue bead then black bead and blue and black and blue and black and on and on...
She's making Merlin a new bracelet since his old one snapped at work. He told her she didn't have to, that it was okay because it was his fault, getting it caught in the storage room on some stray nail in a shelf. She can picture the string of threads tearing, tiny blue and black and white beads slipping off and away. She knows she should have used something stronger so she's going over this one twice with french wire.
It's not really as big of a deal as Merlin's making it. Sure, they're tiny and the smaller eye needles are kind of a necessary pain for these ones but it’s the first bit of jewelry she learned to make on her own. Over the years, she’d turned it into a thing of hers to make one for everyone.
It was a shame she was out of white beads. She had given it thought to go running to the craft store in the morning but her mind had been racing tonight, refusing to let her sleep. Her hands had needed something to do then, something quick and well-rehearsed, and the pattern of blue and black and blue and black was keeping her hands steady and her mind away from her once-friends and all the secrets they were keeping from each other and from themselves. These were the people she had once adorned with her strings and her beads, and adored, with her heart and soul, her entire being. Now, she can’t speak to them of the things they have willfully forgotten because that would be a breach of confidence, of a trust between her and their past selves, and she is bound to them and all their oaths even if they are no longer around.
She tries to not let the loneliness creep out more than it absolutely needs to, instead, tries to thread her memories into these bits of metal and plastic and glass and wood. With every twist and snip and knot of string, she gives what is left of her away to them.
________________________________
|◄◄|2001|►|
She’s sitting on a beanbag chair, close to the window, with a rainbow of cords and beads around her feet and sun pouring in from behind her back.
Merlin had said that it set her hair aglow, in those words exactly, when he’d first walked in with Will in tow.
Will had groaned and said, “I’m stuck here with two girls,” and then turned to Gwen with, “please do him a favour and stop making those things for him.”
“So tell me,” Will says to Merlin now, as they wait for Dogma to finish rewinding on Gaius’ dinosaur-era VCR. “Do you ever give her anything in return?”
"He has a point," Gwen calls out, teasing, eyes and hands still on her work. She’s seen Dogma anyway, maybe one time too many, and maintains it’s overrated with Alan Rickman being maybe the only amazing thing about it. "Did you know that there’s a Hindu festival in which girls tie holy threads around the wrists of men they consider their brothers and get gifts or money in return?"
"Actually” Merlin throws over his shoulder, “I do know. Did you know that originally it started with women tying the thread as a request for protection? How about I offer you my manly protection and we’ll call it even."
Will laughs at that and says, "You sound like your boyfriend,” and Gwen has to silently agree when he adds, “only that from him, it kind of sounds legit and all.”
“I resent that!” But she knows better and Merlin totally does not. “I can beat people up. With my mind. Kind of.”
“Sweetheart,” Gwen laughs, clutching the bracelet she’s making for Morgana close so that the beads don’t go flying this way and that. “You can’t even tell it what to do. Maybe you can get really angry one day and fry my toaster if it wrongs me, then we’ll call it even."
"Fine,” he says, absolutely set on this. “Every bracelet equals protection from one misbehaving appliance."
Will glances at Merlin's wrists. "Looks like you've got a few kitchens covered."
*
The bracelet she puts together for Will is white string and silver wire with matching beads, the smallest kind she could find.
Will left early so he isn’t there to appreciate it but in the late afternoon light, Merlin remarks that it looks like the beginnings of chainmail. This earns him a smile from Gwen and an opinion of, "Well, he is quite brave."
"He's afraid of heights. And the dark. And clowns. We were at the fair, and he wouldn’t go on the Ferris wheel, and when he did, Morgana said he nearly wet his pants."
"That may be," she says, "but when it counts, I think Will could be quite the white knight."
"Oh no,” and she knows that look of mock horror. “You’re crushing on him, aren’t you? Well, you crush on everyone so I suppose I shouldn’t even be surprised."
Gwen rolls her eyes. "You know you make me sound like a tramp the way you put it." Crushes are so simple, so transient, she wants to say. Her fault is that she falls in love, with everything and everyone and often wishes she didn’t have such a tendency towards it. It’s not the we-must-be-together-forever kind of falling either but her heart swells for the people that she sees the beauty in.
Merlin calls himself a classical optimist but even he had once told her that she saw far too much beauty in everyone and couldn’t seem to let go of it. She doesn’t know why or how that’s supposed to be a bad thing, to love indiscriminately. The danger was probably in the intensity. She loved too deeply right along with loving too much.
|►►|2004
________________________________
|►arthur|
Arthur finally sees Morgana the night after Camelot Neuroservices’ annual research conference. He finds himself on one side of the booth at a sushi joint Morgana dug up, nursing his green tea and wishing they served black coffee at this place.
He tries to hum and nod in the right places as she raves about some new equipment they’ll be getting at the lab and the high-res imaging and how she’ll be better able to take a peek inside their clients’ anterior amygdalae. Also, apparently her newest publication on implicit memory just got some coverage on Channel 4 news last Sunday, and she throws in the conversational, “Did you see it, Arthur?”
He says he did, and he really had. He just happened to forget most of it like he forgot what the temperature and the probability of precipitation was on that day even though he distinctly remembers seeing that on Channel 4 too. He’s proud of her, really and truly, but as far as the company, its research, and its services are concerned, he could not really be less invested. It's technically a disgrace from both sides of the equation, and he’s well aware of it to the point where he’d once gone to see his father and discovered that Morgana’s coworkers had nicknamed him the Renegade Prince of Camelot Neuroservices. (Although, come to think of it, he’s not entirely sure that his father wasn’t behind that one.) He’s also aware that the sensible thing for any sensible son to do would be to follow in his father’s footsteps and take over the reins of a project of not only such remarkable but its near-frightening degree of success.
Even if Uther had tried time and time again to throw Arthur into the midst of it in one form or another, Arthur could never feign interest in his father's work for too long. Despite ample media coverage on the lawsuits and the controversies around the company, it wasn’t even that the morality of it stopped Arthur. He knew what drove his father behind it all: the desire to help others forget the kind of pain and suffering he could not bring himself to erase. Regardless of how convoluted that logic may have been, his father had good intentions, and Arthur couldn't take that away from him. Morgana, however, was easily immersed and invested in her work, and given her beyond freakish enthusiasm and the tendency to be both a perfectionist and a workaholic, she thrived at Camelot. All in all, it worked out quite nicely except for when people would mistaken Morgana as Uther's biological child and Arthur as the adopted one. That one always went over well at the cocktail parties.
All things considered, he’s convinced he’s doing his family a great service by listening to Morgana wax poetic about brain-imaging on a weeknight. The last Arthur remembered of anything resembling anatomy, let alone neuroanatomy, was the bio dissection in his junior year of high school. Much to his father’s chagrin, it had been enough to turn him off and run far, far away in the opposite direction, towards the kind and clean world of numbers. He hopes his father keeps his professional intentions focused on Morgana entirely and never look back at the idea of Arthur handling of a business that dealt so obsessively and extensively with-well-brains.
Even now, there are times, like right now, when Morgana talks about the electrocution of brain cells necessary for selective and targeted memory erasure and Arthur can't help but feel a little ill, and even a little miserable for reasons he can’t point out. He thinks it might just be that he feels sorry for the brain cells or something. Poor bastards never got a say in any of it.
*
Morgana offers to drive him back but he lets her drop him to Long Island City station instead. The commute has sort of grown on him now.
The station is fairly busy, even for a weeknight, and especially for this hour. It’s getting darker earlier these days but he likes the way the air hits his lungs with the chill of early autumn. It wakes him up and adds an edge to his senses. This, perhaps, is what leads him to pick up on it when some discourteous idiot blasts his music at maximum volume like he owns the place. It’s some clinky tune with next to nonexistent bass and Arthur can’t decide if that makes it less or more outrageous. When he turns towards the sound, there’s a skinny kid standing some distance away, wrapped up in too much subzero winter gear for this time of year and the most enormous headphones Arthur has ever seen.
He’s well aware that his glaring will do no good considering the recipient of it wouldn’t budge if there was an explosion two feet away, but Arthur’s glare turns into observation at some unidentifiable point, and he blames it entirely on the light. It has to be something about the harsh overhead lighting being the only light source on the platforms at this hour and the way it illuminates and casts shadows on what little he can see of the face behind the gigantic headphones, the sharp cut of cheekbones-
His view is interrupted by the guy pulling his neon-orange scarf-seriously?-higher up around his neck. And that's when Arthur catches a flash of colours at his wrist and thinks to hit his head against the nearest wall because now he remembers.
It’s Music Snob, with the funny name that Arthur could’ve swore he would never forget and has, of course, completely forgotten.
He thinks of approaching him, making some snide comment just to make conversation so he can figure out his name again because this is going to nag at him now. He half considers following through on it but the train's pulling up and people are pushing against one another with such speed and capacity to get inside that he loses sight of record-store boy.
*
It’s when he makes his way to bed that night that it hits him.
He fumbles for a pen, fails, and flicks on a light and searches for it in the nearest drawer. In bright red ink, he scrawls it on the back of his hand. Merlin.
This time, he won’t forget.
*
Arthur has several jumbled dreams that night but only a few stick with him after waking.
The first has Morgana sitting across from him in a coffee shop, drawing a human brain on napkins from three different angles and labeling the lobes.
She labels one as Arthur, one as herself, one as Gwen, and leaves the last blank. On the blank, she draws a little lightening bolt and because he doesn't know what to say to that, he asks her whose brain this is.
She smiles, mysterious and a little sad, but maybe he's just imagining that.
It doesn't matter, dream-Morgana says. We are all the same.
The second dream is full of snatches of conversation that he doesn’t quite catch. There are hushed voices and mournful murmurs and he overhears enough to know that Morgana and his father are talking about his life and he is somewhere in the room. He is either asleep or dead but he can’t know for sure.
There are others in between, almost certainly, but they fade and pale against the last.
It’s a vivid shock of heat and touch, of and arms and legs wrapped around him, up close and intense, and he thinks he should be able to pull away to breathe but he physically cannot, has no desire to. All the while, there’s a hum of something that sounds like a breathless chuckle and another voice that sounds remarkably like his own. The voice that's his is saying a name, low in his throat and desperate.
He wakes up breathing hard, blood rushing out of his extremities and down, down, down as he sits up. He presses his fingers against his forehead and groans into the palm of his hand, thinking, what in the world-
Apparently, his subconscious is obsessed with brains and death and some annoying kid with attitude he saw once at a record store and once again at the rail station. He blames it on listening to Morgana's research babble and the fact that he can't even remember the last time he got laid.
Other than that, he’s got nothing.
*
[ next]
film prompt: eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
characters/pairings: merlin, arthur, morgana, gwen (main); merlin/arthur (main); everyone/everyone on the side
rating: pg-13
| part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6 | part 7 | part 8 | part 9 | part 10 | part 11 | part 12 | part 13 | part 14 | part 15 | part 16 |
*
|►merlin|
He spends far too much time at the record store, especially after hours, and especially in the listening booth.
He wonders sometimes if it’s possible to turn the music all the way up until it takes away his hearing. He knows it's silly, knows it has to be, and Gaius has given him long and drawn-out speeches all his life about kids today and how this generation will suffer from hearing loss collectively at the age of thirty anyway given their rock concerts and earphone-mania and such. Merlin's not generally one for self-destruction only that sometimes the curiosity sort of runs wild.
There is that and the fact that something else is going on here, here being his head. No, he's (usually) pretty sure he's not crazy or heading in that direction but there are moments when headaches take on a life of their own, forming a throbbing pulse of sorts that grows louder until he can feel something like a crackle, like static in clothing fresh from the dryer. And when he can practically hear the tiny shocks fire in quick succession, he has to reconsider a lot of the logic behind his sanity.
The sounds are just that for the most part and they tend to follow a pattern, getting a bit louder and more intense if he's in a particularly crappy mood. Other times, they come out of nowhere and he has to make a bit of an effort at not being entirely terrified then. It’s as if something inside him wants out, cries out, all suffocation and impatience, and he has to press against it, apply pressure as if to a bleeding wound, thinking, no you don’t.
*
He spends the next few days trying to piece it together by himself.
There is no absolutely no way he’s telling Gaius because he knows that Gaius would pull out his DSM so fast and Merlin knows his chances when it comes to that. Moreover, he has read enough about antipsychotics and, long story short, they scare him half to death; meds in general do. He's had an unfriendly relationship with them from as far back as he can remember, so thanks but no thanks, and he will be avoiding any medical advice that screws with his brain chemistry like the plague.
The thing with thinking it through on his own is that it requires the kind of effort his mind is not willing to supply, not now and not for some time to come. He tries for ignorance then, lets himself be pulled into the exhaustion of being on his feet at the record store most days. Later, other things serve as distractions, like late nights with Will watching Harold and Kumar on their trek to Whitecastle, or watching Gwen at work, deft fingers stringing metal clasps and beads together for her friends or the flea market. Other days, the music helps, replacing the pulse in his head with its own so long as it's loud and furious and absolutely relentless. There are days where he believes it to be genuinely more potent than the ibuprofen.
*
He manages to kill his days like this until one Sunday evening. Merlin's getting ready to close up shop for the day when a customer walks in looking nothing like their usual clientele.
He's all broad shoulders and golden hair, red dress-shirt and black dinner jacket, and Merlin is maybe a little bit fixated on the line of his jaw, or the glimpses he manages to catch of it from between the revolving shelves at the other end of the store. The man seems to shuffle around from genre to genre, finally settling on something from the store's very small Top 40 section. The fact that they have it at all is really all on Freya. Nimueh had gone along with it to boost sales since they were the only music store for miles. Classy businesswoman that she was, she'd proposed that they may as well reap the benefits and it wasn't up to Merlin to protest.
By the time the man comes to the check-out counter, Merlin's eyes are nowhere near the counter itself and he wants to hit himself for it a little. He can swear he's going to make a complete and utter fool of himself with this transaction, probably by hitting the VISA key instead of Debit or something, which is pretty much what he tends to do when he is facing anything resembling ridiculously attractive strangers at work.
It is fortunate, however, that this one manages to spare him the embarrassment because the stranger ceases to be ridiculously attractive the instant he opens his mouth to speak.
*
|►arthur|
“For a music store,” Arthur looks around, “the music here is surprisingly difficult to find.”
The guy at the cash counter rings out Arthur with a light, thinly-veiled snort at the album as if to say Hillary Duff? Really? “Most of our customers seem to manage just fine.”
"It's a gift," Arthur counters gruffly and maybe a little unnecessarily, but it is. It's for Lance's niece because she's turning ten, and Arthur’s pretty sure that ten is too young to question a kid's taste in music.
The sales guy seems to think differently because as the bill prints, he's giving Arthur the kind of look that makes him fight the urge to say something petty and defensive. He should not need to justify his purchases to a guy named-he practically laughs out loud at the sight of the name-tag-Merlin.
"So tell me, Merlin," he means to match his tone with a sneer but can’t quite manage it. The combination of big ears and even bigger headphones around a pale neck covered with threads and cords of every colour to ever exist stops him in his tracks. Arthur can feel his face twisting into what he’s pretty sure is a gaping motion of the I-don't-even-know-where-to-begin-with-you variety as he tries to not feel too affronted by the chaotic display of, well, person, before him. He grinds out, "What would you suggest for a ten year old girl on her birthday?"
"Someone in her life with better taste in music for starters.” The guy is quite obviously biting back a smirk as he places the paper-bagged CD on the counter. “We usually leave tween pop to Target and the like. I’m surprised we even carry this. Probably Freya again,” he mutters, and Arthur knows he shouldn't even bother to ask. Still, this is just bad marketing.
“Are you actively trying to put this store out of business?” Arthur taps his fingers against the counter top, waiting to get his credit card and his bill and be out of this ridiculous place with its ridiculous paper bags and even more ridiculous sales staff. He’s pretty sure being a music snob is part of the job description in these dingy indie record stores but he’d never thought that being so irritatingly judgmental of the customers (not to mention of the merchandise they were buying from your store) was also on the list. “At any rate, I have somewhere to be and getting there today would be nice.” Whatever this Merlin fellow mumbles after that is barely audible and totally lost on him.
Their fingers brush when he hands Arthur his credit card bill and a pen to sign it with, and Arthur catches a glint of silver on his wrist, peeking out from below the sleeve of the first of many layers. Arthur swears it’s shaped like a tiny lightning bolt but given the rest of this guy’s get-up, it shouldn’t be all that surprising. The momentary distraction does not make him miss the flickering of the lights overhead. Sliding the receipt and the pen back over the counter, he grabs his own copy and, quirking a thumb upwards, says, “Maintenance. Might want to get on that,” and he makes his exit too fast to catch the scowl that's inevitably coming his way.
________________________________
|►gwen|
Blue bead then black bead and blue and black and blue and black and on and on...
She's making Merlin a new bracelet since his old one snapped at work. He told her she didn't have to, that it was okay because it was his fault, getting it caught in the storage room on some stray nail in a shelf. She can picture the string of threads tearing, tiny blue and black and white beads slipping off and away. She knows she should have used something stronger so she's going over this one twice with french wire.
It's not really as big of a deal as Merlin's making it. Sure, they're tiny and the smaller eye needles are kind of a necessary pain for these ones but it’s the first bit of jewelry she learned to make on her own. Over the years, she’d turned it into a thing of hers to make one for everyone.
It was a shame she was out of white beads. She had given it thought to go running to the craft store in the morning but her mind had been racing tonight, refusing to let her sleep. Her hands had needed something to do then, something quick and well-rehearsed, and the pattern of blue and black and blue and black was keeping her hands steady and her mind away from her once-friends and all the secrets they were keeping from each other and from themselves. These were the people she had once adorned with her strings and her beads, and adored, with her heart and soul, her entire being. Now, she can’t speak to them of the things they have willfully forgotten because that would be a breach of confidence, of a trust between her and their past selves, and she is bound to them and all their oaths even if they are no longer around.
She tries to not let the loneliness creep out more than it absolutely needs to, instead, tries to thread her memories into these bits of metal and plastic and glass and wood. With every twist and snip and knot of string, she gives what is left of her away to them.
________________________________
|◄◄|2001|►|
She’s sitting on a beanbag chair, close to the window, with a rainbow of cords and beads around her feet and sun pouring in from behind her back.
Merlin had said that it set her hair aglow, in those words exactly, when he’d first walked in with Will in tow.
Will had groaned and said, “I’m stuck here with two girls,” and then turned to Gwen with, “please do him a favour and stop making those things for him.”
“So tell me,” Will says to Merlin now, as they wait for Dogma to finish rewinding on Gaius’ dinosaur-era VCR. “Do you ever give her anything in return?”
"He has a point," Gwen calls out, teasing, eyes and hands still on her work. She’s seen Dogma anyway, maybe one time too many, and maintains it’s overrated with Alan Rickman being maybe the only amazing thing about it. "Did you know that there’s a Hindu festival in which girls tie holy threads around the wrists of men they consider their brothers and get gifts or money in return?"
"Actually” Merlin throws over his shoulder, “I do know. Did you know that originally it started with women tying the thread as a request for protection? How about I offer you my manly protection and we’ll call it even."
Will laughs at that and says, "You sound like your boyfriend,” and Gwen has to silently agree when he adds, “only that from him, it kind of sounds legit and all.”
“I resent that!” But she knows better and Merlin totally does not. “I can beat people up. With my mind. Kind of.”
“Sweetheart,” Gwen laughs, clutching the bracelet she’s making for Morgana close so that the beads don’t go flying this way and that. “You can’t even tell it what to do. Maybe you can get really angry one day and fry my toaster if it wrongs me, then we’ll call it even."
"Fine,” he says, absolutely set on this. “Every bracelet equals protection from one misbehaving appliance."
Will glances at Merlin's wrists. "Looks like you've got a few kitchens covered."
*
The bracelet she puts together for Will is white string and silver wire with matching beads, the smallest kind she could find.
Will left early so he isn’t there to appreciate it but in the late afternoon light, Merlin remarks that it looks like the beginnings of chainmail. This earns him a smile from Gwen and an opinion of, "Well, he is quite brave."
"He's afraid of heights. And the dark. And clowns. We were at the fair, and he wouldn’t go on the Ferris wheel, and when he did, Morgana said he nearly wet his pants."
"That may be," she says, "but when it counts, I think Will could be quite the white knight."
"Oh no,” and she knows that look of mock horror. “You’re crushing on him, aren’t you? Well, you crush on everyone so I suppose I shouldn’t even be surprised."
Gwen rolls her eyes. "You know you make me sound like a tramp the way you put it." Crushes are so simple, so transient, she wants to say. Her fault is that she falls in love, with everything and everyone and often wishes she didn’t have such a tendency towards it. It’s not the we-must-be-together-forever kind of falling either but her heart swells for the people that she sees the beauty in.
Merlin calls himself a classical optimist but even he had once told her that she saw far too much beauty in everyone and couldn’t seem to let go of it. She doesn’t know why or how that’s supposed to be a bad thing, to love indiscriminately. The danger was probably in the intensity. She loved too deeply right along with loving too much.
|►►|2004
________________________________
|►arthur|
Arthur finally sees Morgana the night after Camelot Neuroservices’ annual research conference. He finds himself on one side of the booth at a sushi joint Morgana dug up, nursing his green tea and wishing they served black coffee at this place.
He tries to hum and nod in the right places as she raves about some new equipment they’ll be getting at the lab and the high-res imaging and how she’ll be better able to take a peek inside their clients’ anterior amygdalae. Also, apparently her newest publication on implicit memory just got some coverage on Channel 4 news last Sunday, and she throws in the conversational, “Did you see it, Arthur?”
He says he did, and he really had. He just happened to forget most of it like he forgot what the temperature and the probability of precipitation was on that day even though he distinctly remembers seeing that on Channel 4 too. He’s proud of her, really and truly, but as far as the company, its research, and its services are concerned, he could not really be less invested. It's technically a disgrace from both sides of the equation, and he’s well aware of it to the point where he’d once gone to see his father and discovered that Morgana’s coworkers had nicknamed him the Renegade Prince of Camelot Neuroservices. (Although, come to think of it, he’s not entirely sure that his father wasn’t behind that one.) He’s also aware that the sensible thing for any sensible son to do would be to follow in his father’s footsteps and take over the reins of a project of not only such remarkable but its near-frightening degree of success.
Even if Uther had tried time and time again to throw Arthur into the midst of it in one form or another, Arthur could never feign interest in his father's work for too long. Despite ample media coverage on the lawsuits and the controversies around the company, it wasn’t even that the morality of it stopped Arthur. He knew what drove his father behind it all: the desire to help others forget the kind of pain and suffering he could not bring himself to erase. Regardless of how convoluted that logic may have been, his father had good intentions, and Arthur couldn't take that away from him. Morgana, however, was easily immersed and invested in her work, and given her beyond freakish enthusiasm and the tendency to be both a perfectionist and a workaholic, she thrived at Camelot. All in all, it worked out quite nicely except for when people would mistaken Morgana as Uther's biological child and Arthur as the adopted one. That one always went over well at the cocktail parties.
All things considered, he’s convinced he’s doing his family a great service by listening to Morgana wax poetic about brain-imaging on a weeknight. The last Arthur remembered of anything resembling anatomy, let alone neuroanatomy, was the bio dissection in his junior year of high school. Much to his father’s chagrin, it had been enough to turn him off and run far, far away in the opposite direction, towards the kind and clean world of numbers. He hopes his father keeps his professional intentions focused on Morgana entirely and never look back at the idea of Arthur handling of a business that dealt so obsessively and extensively with-well-brains.
Even now, there are times, like right now, when Morgana talks about the electrocution of brain cells necessary for selective and targeted memory erasure and Arthur can't help but feel a little ill, and even a little miserable for reasons he can’t point out. He thinks it might just be that he feels sorry for the brain cells or something. Poor bastards never got a say in any of it.
*
Morgana offers to drive him back but he lets her drop him to Long Island City station instead. The commute has sort of grown on him now.
The station is fairly busy, even for a weeknight, and especially for this hour. It’s getting darker earlier these days but he likes the way the air hits his lungs with the chill of early autumn. It wakes him up and adds an edge to his senses. This, perhaps, is what leads him to pick up on it when some discourteous idiot blasts his music at maximum volume like he owns the place. It’s some clinky tune with next to nonexistent bass and Arthur can’t decide if that makes it less or more outrageous. When he turns towards the sound, there’s a skinny kid standing some distance away, wrapped up in too much subzero winter gear for this time of year and the most enormous headphones Arthur has ever seen.
He’s well aware that his glaring will do no good considering the recipient of it wouldn’t budge if there was an explosion two feet away, but Arthur’s glare turns into observation at some unidentifiable point, and he blames it entirely on the light. It has to be something about the harsh overhead lighting being the only light source on the platforms at this hour and the way it illuminates and casts shadows on what little he can see of the face behind the gigantic headphones, the sharp cut of cheekbones-
His view is interrupted by the guy pulling his neon-orange scarf-seriously?-higher up around his neck. And that's when Arthur catches a flash of colours at his wrist and thinks to hit his head against the nearest wall because now he remembers.
It’s Music Snob, with the funny name that Arthur could’ve swore he would never forget and has, of course, completely forgotten.
He thinks of approaching him, making some snide comment just to make conversation so he can figure out his name again because this is going to nag at him now. He half considers following through on it but the train's pulling up and people are pushing against one another with such speed and capacity to get inside that he loses sight of record-store boy.
*
It’s when he makes his way to bed that night that it hits him.
He fumbles for a pen, fails, and flicks on a light and searches for it in the nearest drawer. In bright red ink, he scrawls it on the back of his hand. Merlin.
This time, he won’t forget.
*
Arthur has several jumbled dreams that night but only a few stick with him after waking.
The first has Morgana sitting across from him in a coffee shop, drawing a human brain on napkins from three different angles and labeling the lobes.
She labels one as Arthur, one as herself, one as Gwen, and leaves the last blank. On the blank, she draws a little lightening bolt and because he doesn't know what to say to that, he asks her whose brain this is.
She smiles, mysterious and a little sad, but maybe he's just imagining that.
It doesn't matter, dream-Morgana says. We are all the same.
The second dream is full of snatches of conversation that he doesn’t quite catch. There are hushed voices and mournful murmurs and he overhears enough to know that Morgana and his father are talking about his life and he is somewhere in the room. He is either asleep or dead but he can’t know for sure.
There are others in between, almost certainly, but they fade and pale against the last.
It’s a vivid shock of heat and touch, of and arms and legs wrapped around him, up close and intense, and he thinks he should be able to pull away to breathe but he physically cannot, has no desire to. All the while, there’s a hum of something that sounds like a breathless chuckle and another voice that sounds remarkably like his own. The voice that's his is saying a name, low in his throat and desperate.
He wakes up breathing hard, blood rushing out of his extremities and down, down, down as he sits up. He presses his fingers against his forehead and groans into the palm of his hand, thinking, what in the world-
Apparently, his subconscious is obsessed with brains and death and some annoying kid with attitude he saw once at a record store and once again at the rail station. He blames it on listening to Morgana's research babble and the fact that he can't even remember the last time he got laid.
Other than that, he’s got nothing.
*
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