fic: the world forgetting, by the world forgot - part 8
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|
It’s amidst an argument he’s having with Gaius, something along the lines of his desire to stop being treated like he’s half his age, that a loud crash interrupts him and Merlin turns around to face the hallway light. At any rate, it used to be the hallway light. Now it’s just bits of glass scattered on the parquet floor.
“What is it with that light?” Merlin groans, and turns to Gaius who has a death-grip on his teacup. Maybe he's just afraid of it shattering as well, but that doesn't explain why all the blood has suddenly drained out of his uncle’s face. “Earth to Gaius,” Merlin snaps his fingers and Gaius nearly spills half his Earl Grey on his lap.
“Merlin,” he says, voice an odd mix of curiousity and concern, and it makes Merlin squirm because he can’t think of what might warrant either. “Has that happened before?”
“Um, yeah, I woke up and found the bulb broken on the floor a few weeks ago. Why? I think that fuse has something going on with it. I’ll call maintenance tomorrow.” Gaius narrows his eyes but Merlin thinks nothing of it.
“Right,” Gaius switches on the lamp in the living room and then approaches the arm of the sofa that Merlin’s perched upon. He squints and turns Merlin’s face left and right, flicks out his penlight to examine Merlin’s eyes, and after feeling his forehead for a temperature, asks if Merlin’s been feeling anything out of the ordinary. Why he couldn’t have asked straight out instead of dishing out the I’m-your-family-physician-as-well-as-your-family routine first, Merlin does not know.
“My pupils are fine.” He bats Gaius’ hands away. “See? I’m not doing drugs.”
“That is the least of my concerns, and you are not answering my question.”
“Everything is fine, Gaius. Better than fine even, and no, there’s nothing I can think of.”
“Better how?” The Eyebrow darts up even higher, and when Merlin throws him his best oblivious look, fully aware of what he just let slip and how Gaius is not one to let these things go, Gaius repeats, “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad, but I would like to know in what way.”
He doesn’t get how Gaius is such a bloody parent sometimes (and makes Merlin feel like a teenager nearly all the time) but he figures he might as well tell him now.They've only just started seeing each other but the realization that he likes Arthur more than enough to want to keep him around is probably what makes him spill it. “I may have met someone.”
“Ah, that's wonderful,” Gaius returns to his tea and readjusts his posture in a way that indicates that this will be a long conversation. Merlin has other plans. “When do I get to meet this someone?”
This time, Merlin does groan out loud. “Too early, Gaius.”
“I do know how you young people are these days, but if it starts getting serious, I would very much like to meet this…”
“Arthur,” Merlin supplies, vaguely suspecting he will regret it later. “His name is Arthur, and I’ll keep that in mind,” and he’s looking out at the darkening sky as he says it so he does not see any signs of the second crash coming before it does.
This time it is the teacup that used to be in Gaius’s hand and Merlin practically jumps at the sound. Before Merlin can say another word or convince himself that this place isn’t haunted, Gaius clamours towards the cleaning supply closet, muttering away about his old bones and slippery china cups. Merlin joins him in cleaning up and decides that perhaps it would be wiser not to ask.
________________________________
|►gwen|
Some people have more room in their hearts than others and there are different reasons for this.
It’s not that Morgana has little room. Gwen just thinks that Morgana likes to tell herself she does. It makes it easier to put up an eviction notice that way. Gwen wants to fault her for it but she can't.
She’s thinking this when Morgana shows up at her doorstep, pink from the cold and with snow stuck to her coat and her hair. Gwen lets her inside before she can even ask.
“At first I thought you were trying to show me up back at the coffee-shop, but then I remembered that you were you and you wouldn’t do that.”
Gwen takes her coat away and puts it away for her with a secret smile. “I know you thought it would be an unmitigated disaster, but it might have been nice if you’d stayed.”
Morgana shoots her a look that says you don’t really believe that. Maybe not, thinks Gwen, but she’s allowed to pretend.
“So how did it go?” Morgana asks at last.
And Gwen tells her the truth, which is, as well as it could have, and that it was interestingly more awkward talking to Merlin than it was to Arthur because she and Merlin had been failing at this entire friendship thing for some time now.
And there is more to it, just as there always is, but she and Morgana don’t talk about that. If Gwen knows Morgana as well as she thinks she does, she knows that Morgana has been determined to avoid asking herself all the questions she knows she will probably need to at some point. It’s either that or rushing headlong into an over-analysis of how two people who had fallen in love and then forgotten each other ended up finding each other again.
Morgana’s lost in thought for a moment and something in her features softens. “You know why I had to leave, don’t you?”
Gwen nods, “Of course.”
*
Gwen is confident that she can easily make a documentary, title it, Morgana: Through the Ages, and have it be pretty darn accurate. She has seen the way Morgana has morphed from that closed-off girl she’d been at first, encased in an imaginary shield of indifference, to this brilliant young woman, smart-mouthed and no longer able to keep her warmth stifled inside.
She’d liked her from the start and Merlin had said something about how they balanced each other out.
Morgana had always claimed to have spent most of her life looking out for number one. She had said that if she didn’t do it, who would? And Gwen had always made a point to counter with, we will. Once, Gwen had even managed to pry a smile out of her with that, and Morgana had said, “That's very sweet of you. Arthur says it too, in not so many words of course, but he means it all the same.” She had then gone on to argue that it was still impractical to hope for that. “We are all so busy taking care of ourselves that I can't imagine how we can volunteer so easily to take care of another person and do a decent job of it too.”
It’s never done easily, Gwen had thought then.
And now she thinks, but you knew that all along.
*
The first and maybe only time Morgana had talked about it was when they were nineteen. Gwen had a sociology exam the next day but she would’ve been kidding herself if she’d thought for a moment that she could ignore the state of her roommate. Morgana had just hung up the phone on Uther over an argument Gwen had barely caught one side of. She’d caught enough to know that it was an argument about someone else and judging by how upset Morgana had been, Gwen had a guess.
Gwen had made them tea and Morgana had taken a moment to collect herself and then calmly offered the story of her life in return.
Her mother had died when she had been too young to remember, and then her father, when she was fourteen. She’d had a distant aunt who had been the only relative her parents had stayed in touch with, and she'd told Morgana that Uther-a friend of her father’s whom she had barely known-was to take care of her now. Uther, her aunt had said, had money and people to cook and clean at his place, and he was was willing to take on the responsibility of another child.
“By responsibility, she’d meant liability, of course,” Morgana had said. “And then I’d thought of that boy, Arthur. You know, I couldn't stand him when I was younger. He was a brat and a half and wouldn't let me play with anything at his house, but then I'd moved in and he was different. I guess we bonded over dead mothers or something.
“And it was strange in the beginning, having Arthur be a big brother, though he slowly became freakishly good at it. He wouldn't let me get into cars with boys and used to check my coat pockets for cigarettes for as long as he could without me catching him at it. He was still a kid himself, you know? Just a year older than me, but I figured it gave him something to do. He was so crap at conversation but you could tell he tried, and he cared, and from that horrid house, I loved him best, possibly more than anyone in the world at that time because no one I'd loved from before was alive.
“The funniest thing was that I couldn't stand Uther for the longest time. He was perfectly kind to me but he was such a shit parent to his son. The saddest thing of all was that Arthur would never even notice because he was so used to it. The man didn't show a drop of affection and all he cared for were grades and sports and making sure his boy was the best at everything never mind the toll it took on him. And I would think, wow, if I had a kid, I wouldn't care if he flunked out of school as long as he was loved. And I don't know, Gwen, someone had to take care of him too. He'd tried for me until he really couldn't because I wasn't easy to take care of and I know somewhere along the way we became distant. Still, he was my family, is still my family, and we knew that we would try to take care of each other even if we didn't always know how to go about it.”
________________________________
|►arthur|
He dreams of snow and slippery ice beneath him. Someone reaches for his hand and lifts him to his feet and it’s then that he remembers having fallen at all.
In another dream, he’s standing in a room lit by candlelight and Merlin whispers something that makes his eyes turn gold. Arthur opens his mouth to speak, to ask, but Merlin pulls him closer, kisses him, weaves fingers in his hair, under his shirt, and works his lips across the skin and bones of his jaw. Arthur can hardly think to move. His eyes are closed and he's sensing, feeling, and not thinking at all when the room grows infinitely hotter-as it ought to, he figures-and then he feels the burn.
There are flames lapping at his fingertips and licking at his lips. When he blinks, he is by himself in the dark, and in his mouth, there is the taste of ash.
________________________________
|◄◄|1999|►merlin|forgotten|
They’re in Merlin’s dorm room the first time it happens.
More specifically, they’re on Merlin’s bed, and there isn’t much else to it, not with Arthur’s mouth, scorching hot, moving from his neck to his collarbone.
He’s got his hand curled tight in Arthur’s hair just as Arthur reaches for the waistband of Merlin’s jeans when all the lights in the room start flickering, current buzzing louder and louder, until the lamp by his closet explodes.
Arthur falls off the bed, screaming a string of curses, and looks downright terrified for his life. And Merlin, who should be at least wary of it by now, comes close to toppling over from the shock of it going off completely unannounced like that.
“What the fuck?” Arthur’s still saying, over and over again, and Merlin can’t blame him. “Call maintenance. Hell, call someone. That is not safe. Your wiring could have killed-”
“It’s not the wiring,” Merlin says, running a hand over his face. He doesn’t know why he’s telling Arthur this. He supposes he likes him quite a bit if he’s doing it though.
Arthur shoots him a look like he’s lost his mind. “What’s wrong with you? Of course it’s the wiring.”
“No, Arthur. It’s not. You can ask Gwen,” and Merlin then proceeds to have the most awkward conversation of his life with the one person he’s absolutely terrified of scaring away.
*
Arthur drills him with questions upon questions, and they seem to be more out of skepticism than interest until it reaches the point where it becomes the other way around. Merlin shrugs and hates that he has less than half the answers. The questions Arthur asks are good ones and very much like the ones he’s asked himself all his life. He can only tell Arthur what he knows, which is mostly that he has been this way for as long as he can remember. Once Merlin gets going though, he’s surprised by how difficult it is to stop. It doesn't help that all the while he's speaking, Arthur is sitting there, just listening, and so intently too.
He tells Arthur about being sent by his mother to live with his uncle, who had tried to apply every trick in his book to help Merlin manage it. It had worked well enough to let him function more or less normally, so long as Merlin generally kept himself within a certain emotional range.
“But you’re always so ridiculously chipper,” Arthur interrupts, “and you are like the furthest thing from any sort of emotionless robot.”
“I’m better now,” Merlin says with a shrug. He's doubts there's any point in putting his entire childhood under the spotlight. “Long story short, I’ve never been able to shut it up and get rid of it for good. And every now and then, it crops up, as if to say, Hello, Merlin. I’m still around and still winning this.”
Arthur's playing it cool, or as cool as he can under the circumstances, and Merlin can't help but find it a little admirable even as he sees right through it. The tense line of Arthur's spine when he bends to pick up his shirt from the floor gives him away. He's been remarkably quiet through most of Merlin's talking but he speaks now from the far edge of the bed. “So if you’re not crazy, which I’m not completely convinced that you aren’t, why would you hide something like that?”
Because you’re picking up your stuff and leaving, Merlin wants to say. He wants to explain everything he couldn't afford to before, the way he was so terrified of first kisses, afraid of everything since they'd first started seeing each other some months ago because he couldn't risk himself blowing a fuse, literally. And even that wouldn't have been the worst thing. There was always so much more at stake for him, so much more to lose.
“You always said I was so quiet, so careful. This is what happens when I’m not.”
“Merlin-” Evidently, Arthur is annoyed, but he was the one to ask and now Merlin is gong to make him sit and hear it out.
“I was afraid I’d slip up somehow and give myself away, and then you'd be scared or weirded out or both.” And then you’d leave, he thinks, and I couldn’t take that chance.
“Merlin.” It’s quieter now, the way he says it, and Merlin looks up.
“Go for it. I probably deserve it anyway.”
Arthur slumps back down on the bed and glares at the ceiling until he finally shakes off whatever it is that's on his mind. “Come here.” He tugs at Merlin's arm and arranges them both so that they take up all of the smaller than small residence-issued mattress, facing one another. His hand moves absently along the side of Merlin's face, fingers wandering until they catch in hair still mussed from earlier. Even as the touch is unexpectedly gentle, when Arthur speaks, his voice is stern. “You cannot just throw something like that at me and expect me to go on about my day.”
Unthinking, Merlin leans into the touch. “Trust me, I don't expect-if you want to leave me to contemplate my sheer stupidity, for a while or possibly forever, I will understand." As much as it pains him to say it, he will understand, because Merlin knows that there is no reason anyone in their right mind should or would put up with this. "I may even live,” he adds, a wry afterthought, and he will. He just won't be all that happy about it.
“See, I'm not so sure about that last bit,” Arthur says, “so maybe I will stick around.” And there is the smile that Merlin knows so well, the one that follows when Arthur either cannot believe what he's doing or wishes he could stop. It's completely involuntary, unreservedly warm, and heart-stoppingly wonderful to behold. Having been at the root of it countless times, Merlin takes pride upon practically inventing it upon Arthur's face. Perhaps, the thought of this is what convinces him that Arthur's telling the truth.
“So I haven’t managed to weird you out?” Merlin’s voice sounds sickeningly hopeful even to his own ears but it feels like a small price to pay for everything Arthur has just overlooked.
“Of course you have. You are totally weird and I will probably be terrified at the thought of even getting to second base with you for a very long time-oh, stop sulking! The point is that I'll get over it. We’ll turn out the lights and find candles or something you can’t screw up. We'll make it work.”
When Merlin grins, grateful, Arthur mirrors it. Arthur repeats it, softer this time, until it sounds like a promise-we will-until Merlin lets the words take up all the space in his head.
|►►|2004
*
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