fic: the world forgetting, by the world forgot - part 6
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 |
*
|►arthur|
They don’t talk a lot about family, not usually, but the one other time Merlin brings up his uncle, it is to say that the man never failed to remind him that he could be doing something better with his life.
Arthur knows the feeling. He is pretty sure that he’s an embarrassment to his own father because he doesn’t relish the thought of sitting in someone’s house overnight while wiping their mind clean. To Merlin, he says, “He probably thinks that with a degree in psychology and literature, you could be doing better than working at a record store.”
“There is nothing wrong with working at a record store. I happen to like it,” Merlin says, simple and open. “I know what you’re going to say, and before you ask me what it is, I’m going to tell you that it doesn’t matter.”
*
And slowly, he’s starting to get it.
He’s been coming and going and drifting between these walls often enough now that he can no longer tell if it’s this place and its people that are becoming less ridiculous or if he’s upping his own madness in a way that lets him meet them halfway. Either way, it’s starting to make sense. Every person, every corner, everything here speaks of something, and it’s about more than just the music.
There’s feeling in the way the walls are painted, in the records on display and the hand-written labels on everything. He thinks he’s really starting to lose it when even the teenagers covered in sixteen kinds of ink and metal don’t irk him as much. Maybe he’s finally seeing what Merlin and Freya and Nimueh see, a way of bringing together what they love, the best kept secrets that go overlooked, sharing them. All at once, it feels enormous and more than a little sacred.
*
The dreams haven’t stopped. Now they are just more bizarre in some ways and not others.
He’s running in one of them, chasing after a ghost. An actual ghost. It’s shapeless and shadowy and climbing the stairs two at a time. Arthur’s in the best shape of his life and he still can’t keep up. The ghost doubles its speed, moves in what is practically a flicker of a motion, inhuman speed-of course it’s not human, he thinks. It’s a ghost.
He makes it to the top of the landing, looks down and there’s New York City, bathed in moonlight and nothing else.
*
“Well look at you, Mr. In-Demand. Now who’s difficult to get a hold of?”
It’s Morgana, at the door of his office, and he has absolutely no idea what she’s doing here. He says as much.
“Called you, texted you, was about to knock down your door,” she singsongs, like it’s an age-old nursery rhyme, and he can feel the age-old Morgana-related headache coming on.
“I’m sure that wouldn’t have been necessary.”
“Oh you’d be surprised,” and she flashes him a mysterious smile. “I know how ashamed you are of your gorgeous sister. Heaven forbid anyone at your workplace find out we’re related. Anyway, Uther sent me here to play instant-messenger. Your daddy needs you to free up your Thursday evening.”
“If it’s something to do with awards or promotions, tell him I’m busy.”
“I was told it has something to do with him being your father and missing his baby boy, but you know how everything sounds very different in Uther-tones so I could be wrong.”
Arthur isn’t convinced. “Why is this so urgent?”
“Thursday happens to be tomorrow. Where’s your head at, Arthur P.?”
She blows him a kiss before she disappears.
________________________________
|►merlin|
He’s the high point of your week, Merlin thinks.
He doesn’t know if it’s because work is slow these days or because everything is monotonous at home and his friends have felt like strangers. This is maybe why it’s not so bad looking forward to Arthur’s visits. He can’t remember the last time he met someone new who held his interest and provided him with something of a separate space from the all-around fog his life has become. And if there’s something else there, the way he feels almost doted on, or how he catches himself getting invested in someone he hasn’t even known all that long, Merlin doesn’t want to go anywhere near it with a magnifying glass and a red pen. It’s almost enough the way it is and he doesn’t think he can run the risk of ruining it.
All things considered, Merlin’s quite okay with looking forward to Arthur’s visits right up until the Thursday he doesn’t show up. He tells himself it’s too early, and waits through the evening with his eyes on the clock. Freya even tells him to go home because the store has been empty for hours and she can hang around and close up by herself but he declines. He tells her to take off early and insists he’ll close up like he is scheduled to.
Never mind the fact that Arthur hadn’t even made a commitment and Merlin was just going on the assumption and the pattern of the past two months’ worth of Thursdays, he’s pretty sure he’s making himself sick with it. Even when he turns out the storefront lights at nine-thirty, he can’t get past the feeling of his day being ruined and hating it. He feels like a pining high school girl, waiting on the prom-date that never showed up.
He snaps at Gaius over something stupid like the dishes once he gets home, and skims through his missed calls to find two from Will. He clears the log, feeling petty and vindictive because if they’re all so cryptic with him all the time, he doesn’t know why he should be expected to act any different.
*
It’s nearly nine in the morning when he wakes up to a cold apartment. The completely irrational sense of being stood up still hasn’t left and this is when he surrenders to the thought that he is maybe in over his head a little bit.
Gaius is asleep in his study again, head rolling off to the side of the armchair. Merlin digs out a blanket and drapes it over him. He’s got the thermostat and coffee on his mind as he walks to the kitchen, and it’s barely a sideways glance but the colour catches his eye. When he turns all the way around, it’s to find tiny droplets of blood trailing after him on the tile.
The pain hits then, quick and sharp, and he inspects his foot to find bits of glass stuck to it. Backtracking his steps, he comes across the leftovers of a shattered bulb right below where the hallway light used be.
________________________________
|►arthur|
This is the one that keeps him up at night.
He’s lying on some sort of bed. It’s smaller than his bed at home and he can’t recognize the room. The lighting is dim and the walls are plastered with hundreds of photographs from floor to ceiling. In a flash, everything around him loses colour, fading to white, and a wisp of a voice is all he has left. It’s mumbled, distorted, like a mangled cassette tape. He thinks it says: It’s like I don’t even know you anymore.
And he’s being sat down in an office with a firm hand on his right shoulder. Someone hands him a document, written entirely in fine print, and there’s an 'X' at the bottom. Morgana emerges from a corner and looks immeasurably sad as she says, Arthur, please. He tries to hold the pen, wills himself to write his name because he would do it in a heartbeat if it meant taking that look off her face. Where his signature should be, it reads instead, PLEASE LET ME KEEP THIS, all in block letters, and Morgana leaves the room.
There is a beat of silence, and the bed emerges again. He’s sharing a pillow with someone now and his dream-self runs a hand through the back of disheveled hair, short and dark. He whispers, I'm glad you're here, and it is so quiet that he can hardly hear it himself.
*
He is so tired of it, this waking up in the middle of the night and the pervasive sense of loss and confusion that seems to come out of nowhere but always makes a point of accompanying it.
________________________________
|►merlin|
Arthur shows up on a Monday evening, twenty minutes before closing. He’s the last customer for the night and the only one at this hour, and Merlin busies himself with shipment logs and gives him one-word responses to everything.
Apparently, this does not go unnoticed. “Would you rather I leave or wait until after you close to talk?”
Merlin looks up. “Talk?”
“Yes. With words.”
Merlin shoots him a glare and Arthur shuts right up. Minutes drag on between them in silence until Merlin finishes closing up the first register. Meanwhile, Arthur walks along the wall with the vinyl, observing each cover on the topmost row carefully when Merlin steals a glance. His mind skips back to Arthur’s first visit, the way he’d left this place and been so easy to dislike. It might have been better left that way, easier, at any rate.
“Why do you keep coming here?” And hell, his voice is not allowed to tremble right now.
It only gets worse when Arthur says over his shoulder, “Isn’t it obvious?”
Merlin wants to say he wouldn’t be asking if it was. “I know you’ve never been a fan of the music.”
Arthur makes a one-eighty then and Merlin doesn’t know if he’s imagining it but a look flashes across Arthur’s face. It darkens his eyes. Merlin can’t say how but he knows that look and its ring of resolution. Whatever it is, it’s gone when Arthur turns back to the wall and the sight of the back of his head makes something inside Merlin coil up tight. “Maybe,” Arthur says, “people change.”
Helpful, thinks Merlin, and, this is not how it’s supposed to go. There’s buzzing in his head now, loud and distracting. It’s back after so long that Merlin had almost forgotten the maddening intensity of it. “I’m closing up in ten minutes,” he says over the sound, louder than he’d maybe intended to because, in the moment, he can hardly hear himself think. He tells Arthur to make himself useful and keep an eye on the front while he tidies up the back. It earns him a mock-salute.
He scrambles for his earphones and plays whatever’s next on his playlist. It’s something instrumental and loud and thereby perfect because he can’t be bothered to care as long as it does its job. He scans the clock, starts closing up the last till and switches off the lights in the front. It makes more sense to put away the deposits for the night and lock up the drawers. He’ll swing by the bank when he’s here in the morning and hopefully functioning.
He thinks of telling Arthur that he’s not feeling well, that maybe Arthur should go, but that could either mean questions that Merlin has no answers for or that Arthur would actually comply. It’s when he’s trying to figure out which would be worse that he catches sight of Arthur leaning against the frame of the backroom door. Merlin stops his music in time to hear him say, “I’m probably not supposed to be here now so I was going to ask where you wanted to go.”
Merlin walks past him into the darkness of the store, towards the corner with the listening booth. He flicks on the lamp and takes a seat on the padded bench. Arthur follows and sits beside him in the small space.
It’s a new release from north of the border, the one he picks out, and it’s one that they haven’t received officially and can’t sell legally until the spring. Nimueh has always used her connections to make sure her crew always heard it all first. With this one, Merlin’s confident that she’s struck gold. He plugs in the store’s two sets of sampling headphones and hands one to Arthur who studies them with some curiousity at first but takes them.
It’s almost surprising how easily they manage to share space. Merlin relaxes so that he is no longer hypersensitive to every bit of movement at his side. It helps that Arthur looks ridiculous in giant headphones.
It’s the only copy of the album they have right now so he’s extremely careful with taking it out of its case and sliding it into the disc carousel. By the time he hits play on Stars’ Set Yourself of Fire, the noise in his head has become faint, dulled at the edges. He can feel his breathing slow as he closes his eyes against the swell of strings.
A minute and thirty seconds into it, Arthur takes his hand.
It doesn’t feel life-changing or earth-shattering by any stretch. For all he knows, it could mean nothing. At the end of the day, they are just two people in an empty record store on a weeknight, listening to a song about ex-lovers and endings and beginnings.
Three minutes and thirty seconds into it, Merlin’s pushing away their clunky headphones. His hands are shaking when he tugs at the collar of Arthur’s shirt, and he’s kissing Arthur or it’s the other way around. It’s hard to know for sure and even harder to care. The light in the booth flickers and then goes out, and Merlin can’t be bothered. All he knows is that he’s dizzy with want, so sharp and sudden that it nearly knocks the wind out of him.
*
[ 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 |
*
|►arthur|
They don’t talk a lot about family, not usually, but the one other time Merlin brings up his uncle, it is to say that the man never failed to remind him that he could be doing something better with his life.
Arthur knows the feeling. He is pretty sure that he’s an embarrassment to his own father because he doesn’t relish the thought of sitting in someone’s house overnight while wiping their mind clean. To Merlin, he says, “He probably thinks that with a degree in psychology and literature, you could be doing better than working at a record store.”
“There is nothing wrong with working at a record store. I happen to like it,” Merlin says, simple and open. “I know what you’re going to say, and before you ask me what it is, I’m going to tell you that it doesn’t matter.”
*
And slowly, he’s starting to get it.
He’s been coming and going and drifting between these walls often enough now that he can no longer tell if it’s this place and its people that are becoming less ridiculous or if he’s upping his own madness in a way that lets him meet them halfway. Either way, it’s starting to make sense. Every person, every corner, everything here speaks of something, and it’s about more than just the music.
There’s feeling in the way the walls are painted, in the records on display and the hand-written labels on everything. He thinks he’s really starting to lose it when even the teenagers covered in sixteen kinds of ink and metal don’t irk him as much. Maybe he’s finally seeing what Merlin and Freya and Nimueh see, a way of bringing together what they love, the best kept secrets that go overlooked, sharing them. All at once, it feels enormous and more than a little sacred.
*
The dreams haven’t stopped. Now they are just more bizarre in some ways and not others.
He’s running in one of them, chasing after a ghost. An actual ghost. It’s shapeless and shadowy and climbing the stairs two at a time. Arthur’s in the best shape of his life and he still can’t keep up. The ghost doubles its speed, moves in what is practically a flicker of a motion, inhuman speed-of course it’s not human, he thinks. It’s a ghost.
He makes it to the top of the landing, looks down and there’s New York City, bathed in moonlight and nothing else.
*
“Well look at you, Mr. In-Demand. Now who’s difficult to get a hold of?”
It’s Morgana, at the door of his office, and he has absolutely no idea what she’s doing here. He says as much.
“Called you, texted you, was about to knock down your door,” she singsongs, like it’s an age-old nursery rhyme, and he can feel the age-old Morgana-related headache coming on.
“I’m sure that wouldn’t have been necessary.”
“Oh you’d be surprised,” and she flashes him a mysterious smile. “I know how ashamed you are of your gorgeous sister. Heaven forbid anyone at your workplace find out we’re related. Anyway, Uther sent me here to play instant-messenger. Your daddy needs you to free up your Thursday evening.”
“If it’s something to do with awards or promotions, tell him I’m busy.”
“I was told it has something to do with him being your father and missing his baby boy, but you know how everything sounds very different in Uther-tones so I could be wrong.”
Arthur isn’t convinced. “Why is this so urgent?”
“Thursday happens to be tomorrow. Where’s your head at, Arthur P.?”
She blows him a kiss before she disappears.
________________________________
|►merlin|
He’s the high point of your week, Merlin thinks.
He doesn’t know if it’s because work is slow these days or because everything is monotonous at home and his friends have felt like strangers. This is maybe why it’s not so bad looking forward to Arthur’s visits. He can’t remember the last time he met someone new who held his interest and provided him with something of a separate space from the all-around fog his life has become. And if there’s something else there, the way he feels almost doted on, or how he catches himself getting invested in someone he hasn’t even known all that long, Merlin doesn’t want to go anywhere near it with a magnifying glass and a red pen. It’s almost enough the way it is and he doesn’t think he can run the risk of ruining it.
All things considered, Merlin’s quite okay with looking forward to Arthur’s visits right up until the Thursday he doesn’t show up. He tells himself it’s too early, and waits through the evening with his eyes on the clock. Freya even tells him to go home because the store has been empty for hours and she can hang around and close up by herself but he declines. He tells her to take off early and insists he’ll close up like he is scheduled to.
Never mind the fact that Arthur hadn’t even made a commitment and Merlin was just going on the assumption and the pattern of the past two months’ worth of Thursdays, he’s pretty sure he’s making himself sick with it. Even when he turns out the storefront lights at nine-thirty, he can’t get past the feeling of his day being ruined and hating it. He feels like a pining high school girl, waiting on the prom-date that never showed up.
He snaps at Gaius over something stupid like the dishes once he gets home, and skims through his missed calls to find two from Will. He clears the log, feeling petty and vindictive because if they’re all so cryptic with him all the time, he doesn’t know why he should be expected to act any different.
*
It’s nearly nine in the morning when he wakes up to a cold apartment. The completely irrational sense of being stood up still hasn’t left and this is when he surrenders to the thought that he is maybe in over his head a little bit.
Gaius is asleep in his study again, head rolling off to the side of the armchair. Merlin digs out a blanket and drapes it over him. He’s got the thermostat and coffee on his mind as he walks to the kitchen, and it’s barely a sideways glance but the colour catches his eye. When he turns all the way around, it’s to find tiny droplets of blood trailing after him on the tile.
The pain hits then, quick and sharp, and he inspects his foot to find bits of glass stuck to it. Backtracking his steps, he comes across the leftovers of a shattered bulb right below where the hallway light used be.
________________________________
|►arthur|
This is the one that keeps him up at night.
He’s lying on some sort of bed. It’s smaller than his bed at home and he can’t recognize the room. The lighting is dim and the walls are plastered with hundreds of photographs from floor to ceiling. In a flash, everything around him loses colour, fading to white, and a wisp of a voice is all he has left. It’s mumbled, distorted, like a mangled cassette tape. He thinks it says: It’s like I don’t even know you anymore.
And he’s being sat down in an office with a firm hand on his right shoulder. Someone hands him a document, written entirely in fine print, and there’s an 'X' at the bottom. Morgana emerges from a corner and looks immeasurably sad as she says, Arthur, please. He tries to hold the pen, wills himself to write his name because he would do it in a heartbeat if it meant taking that look off her face. Where his signature should be, it reads instead, PLEASE LET ME KEEP THIS, all in block letters, and Morgana leaves the room.
There is a beat of silence, and the bed emerges again. He’s sharing a pillow with someone now and his dream-self runs a hand through the back of disheveled hair, short and dark. He whispers, I'm glad you're here, and it is so quiet that he can hardly hear it himself.
*
He is so tired of it, this waking up in the middle of the night and the pervasive sense of loss and confusion that seems to come out of nowhere but always makes a point of accompanying it.
________________________________
|►merlin|
Arthur shows up on a Monday evening, twenty minutes before closing. He’s the last customer for the night and the only one at this hour, and Merlin busies himself with shipment logs and gives him one-word responses to everything.
Apparently, this does not go unnoticed. “Would you rather I leave or wait until after you close to talk?”
Merlin looks up. “Talk?”
“Yes. With words.”
Merlin shoots him a glare and Arthur shuts right up. Minutes drag on between them in silence until Merlin finishes closing up the first register. Meanwhile, Arthur walks along the wall with the vinyl, observing each cover on the topmost row carefully when Merlin steals a glance. His mind skips back to Arthur’s first visit, the way he’d left this place and been so easy to dislike. It might have been better left that way, easier, at any rate.
“Why do you keep coming here?” And hell, his voice is not allowed to tremble right now.
It only gets worse when Arthur says over his shoulder, “Isn’t it obvious?”
Merlin wants to say he wouldn’t be asking if it was. “I know you’ve never been a fan of the music.”
Arthur makes a one-eighty then and Merlin doesn’t know if he’s imagining it but a look flashes across Arthur’s face. It darkens his eyes. Merlin can’t say how but he knows that look and its ring of resolution. Whatever it is, it’s gone when Arthur turns back to the wall and the sight of the back of his head makes something inside Merlin coil up tight. “Maybe,” Arthur says, “people change.”
Helpful, thinks Merlin, and, this is not how it’s supposed to go. There’s buzzing in his head now, loud and distracting. It’s back after so long that Merlin had almost forgotten the maddening intensity of it. “I’m closing up in ten minutes,” he says over the sound, louder than he’d maybe intended to because, in the moment, he can hardly hear himself think. He tells Arthur to make himself useful and keep an eye on the front while he tidies up the back. It earns him a mock-salute.
He scrambles for his earphones and plays whatever’s next on his playlist. It’s something instrumental and loud and thereby perfect because he can’t be bothered to care as long as it does its job. He scans the clock, starts closing up the last till and switches off the lights in the front. It makes more sense to put away the deposits for the night and lock up the drawers. He’ll swing by the bank when he’s here in the morning and hopefully functioning.
He thinks of telling Arthur that he’s not feeling well, that maybe Arthur should go, but that could either mean questions that Merlin has no answers for or that Arthur would actually comply. It’s when he’s trying to figure out which would be worse that he catches sight of Arthur leaning against the frame of the backroom door. Merlin stops his music in time to hear him say, “I’m probably not supposed to be here now so I was going to ask where you wanted to go.”
Merlin walks past him into the darkness of the store, towards the corner with the listening booth. He flicks on the lamp and takes a seat on the padded bench. Arthur follows and sits beside him in the small space.
It’s a new release from north of the border, the one he picks out, and it’s one that they haven’t received officially and can’t sell legally until the spring. Nimueh has always used her connections to make sure her crew always heard it all first. With this one, Merlin’s confident that she’s struck gold. He plugs in the store’s two sets of sampling headphones and hands one to Arthur who studies them with some curiousity at first but takes them.
It’s almost surprising how easily they manage to share space. Merlin relaxes so that he is no longer hypersensitive to every bit of movement at his side. It helps that Arthur looks ridiculous in giant headphones.
It’s the only copy of the album they have right now so he’s extremely careful with taking it out of its case and sliding it into the disc carousel. By the time he hits play on Stars’ Set Yourself of Fire, the noise in his head has become faint, dulled at the edges. He can feel his breathing slow as he closes his eyes against the swell of strings.
A minute and thirty seconds into it, Arthur takes his hand.
It doesn’t feel life-changing or earth-shattering by any stretch. For all he knows, it could mean nothing. At the end of the day, they are just two people in an empty record store on a weeknight, listening to a song about ex-lovers and endings and beginnings.
Three minutes and thirty seconds into it, Merlin’s pushing away their clunky headphones. His hands are shaking when he tugs at the collar of Arthur’s shirt, and he’s kissing Arthur or it’s the other way around. It’s hard to know for sure and even harder to care. The light in the booth flickers and then goes out, and Merlin can’t be bothered. All he knows is that he’s dizzy with want, so sharp and sudden that it nearly knocks the wind out of him.
*
[ next]