fic: the world forgetting, by the world forgot - part 10
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 |
*
|◄◄|2003|►arthur|forgotten|
He had taken health management for the first three years of college.
Arthur had known that he could have excelled at anything he put his mind to but, back then, his problem had been apathy. It wasn’t that his options had been entirely foreclosed by his father but there had always been a very strongly suggested bias. His father had laid out the notion of keeping the company in the family, always said that Morgana could take care of the science if Arthur could do the rest, and Arthur had thought, why the hell not.
And then, sometime during his junior year, he had met Merlin. It didn't take him long to become captivated by this strange, strange boy even as he could have sworn it went against every bone of better judgment in his body.
Here was someone who could barely carry a conversation when Arthur had first met him, someone who'd been a walking electrical malfunction all his life. He’d seemed like such a quiet, self-conscious thing, and then Arthur had gotten to know him. He could never have guessed that he would find in Merlin such a wide-angle lens of viewing the world, such colour and saturation, and a sense of optimism that was borderline ridiculous. It was a force to be reckoned with, and Arthur could not help but be pulled into its orbit.
The thing was that the optimism came with an equal and opposite force. Merlin was not afraid to call out the faults in things when he saw them. He was forgiving of people, but fiercely critical of institutions, of larger systems and their agendas. At first, Arthur had taken it as a silly quirk as well, rolled his eyes and smiled, thinking, there's Merlin on another one of his tirades, and then he’d gotten pulled into that too.
Merlin didn’t bother to hide his dislike for the work Uther Pendragon did and when Arthur realized it went beyond just jokes and snide remarks, there was no way for it to not be a sensitive subject. The thing was that Merlin made convincing and passionate arguments and he was always so unrepentant about where he stood that even when Arthur was frustrated, downright maddened, he was charmed. It was something so new for Arthur who had been dragged along by some immeasurable current for as far back as he could remember. It was something he had stopped questioning early on in life and Morgana had given him hell for it on more than one occasion. To have Merlin do the opposite, always, Arthur couldn't tell if he envied or admired it more.
Ultimately, when you had someone like Arthur and someone like Merlin, it was almost impossible for someone like Arthur to not be swayed just a little.
In his fourth year, Arthur had switched out of the management program into accounting and finance, and he'd thought it a surefire way to dodge the bullet of Camelot Neuroservices because Uther certainly had bigger dreams for his son than to keep him as his company’s accountant. Looking back, Arthur knows that Merlin and his talk of microfinance and working with grassroots and charities, and all his excited whispers of, the difference you could make, Arthur, had certainly played a part in it, but it hadn’t been the driving force.
Just this once, Arthur had thought, he'd needed to do something decisive and consequential.
He'd needed to do something for himself.
*
He thinks he has always known the dangers of building a world around a select number of people, even if subconsciously, always felt the warning signs blink in the back of his head long before he'd found himself doing just that. Now, he can neither watch nor look away as one such pillar crumbles before his eyes, as the ground splits, dropping beneath him faster than he can find a ledge to hold on to.
He remembers when she had first come to live with them, looking as if she'd awoken from a nightmare and only to find that it hadn't just been a bad dream. And he remembers her, a decade later-just a month ago, lying on the kitchen floor with empty bottles and colourful pills, then a hospital bed, then the high-risk ward, face haunted and eyes fixed for hours on a point outside the window-until he has to blink against it and stop remembering.
In the state of losing whatever Morgana had left of her mind, she had left Arthur with no other option than the one he had once sworn to never go near. When it came down to choosing between Morgana having a shot at getting her life back or letting her take more chances with her bulletproof sense of self-loathing and yet another overworked psychiatric nurse in New York, it hadn’t been much of a decision at all. It was also maybe the first time he had understood with an alarming degree of clarity why his father did what he did.
This is what he has on his mind one night when Merlin’s voice breaks the silence from behind him.
“You can talk about it, you know? I know it’s eating at you inside.”
“Just go to sleep, Merlin.” He sees no use in troubling Merlin over something he can't fix.
He can feel Merlin reach for him then, a soft rustle of the sheets until there's a warm hand on his shoulder. Arthur shrugs it off, barely conscious that he's done it. Later, when he can sense Merlin withdrawing into himself, he wonders if it was one of those moments where being raised at a distance as the son of Uther Pendragon had kicked in like autopilot. When he turns around in their bed, he’s met with the sight of Merlin’s back. They’ve been going at this long enough for Arthur to pick up on the signs of him screwing up. This time, however, he has also apparently given Merlin a head start in putting up the barriers.
“Merlin,” he says, a quiet huff of a breath, and gets nothing. “I know you’re not asleep.”
Some other day, he would have tried harder, pushed further, but he’s tired from thinking and thinking and thinking and the fatigue feels physical.
They lie through the night, back to back.
*
It doesn’t take Merlin long to connect the dots. Arthur's sure that Merlin knows that, next to himself, there is only one other person that has had the power to override all the default settings in Arthur's life. And so, he asks what Arthur had hoped he wouldn't. “You’re considering it, aren’t you?”
If it’s inevitable, Arthur thinks there’s no point in hiding it. “I am. And before you lash out about giving into the plagues of corporate medicine, she is my sister, and this is the only way.”
“Arthur, no,” and Merlin looks at him, empathetic. He wears the loss and brittleness and everything Arthur can’t or won’t let himself feel. “Just be there for her,” Merlin says. “Talk to her.”
“Merlin, for once, please, back off. This is not your business. It’s not your family.”
“But she’s my friend,” and Merlin stresses, voice growing desperate even as Arthur could care less right now, “and you are closer to me than family. I think it matters and I don't think you should give up.”
“It’s not giving up. It’s been tested and proven to work. My father has gone through thousands of clients. Whatever happens, she’ll get better.” She has to, he tells himself, because from here, there is no way but up. “Why would I not want that for her?”
And Merlin shakes his head and turns away, the smallest and weariest of laughs escaping him.
“What is it?”
"Is that what you’re going to do if something goes wrong with us?"
And Arthur doesn’t even know how it’s turned into that. “What kind of stupid question is that?”
“That’s not exactly a No, Merlin. I will not erase you if you piss me off.”
It's coming close to shouting. Somewhere in his mind, they are already there. And he hates it just as he knows Merlin does.
“You’re insane.” Arthur takes a breath, a deep lungful of it. He reaches for Merlin's face, brushes a thumb over his cheek and watches his eyes flutter closed. I wouldn't, he thinks. You know I wouldn’t.
*
He knows it can’t mean well that Merlin doesn't speak to him for a week after Morgana's erasure.
And one day, Arthur has to sit him down and say to him, “I’m sorry, Merlin,” even though he is absolutely not, not for what he has done, has had to do, “but wishful thinking is not a cure for everything, not when people are met with disasters that they can't patch up like that," and he snaps his fingers. "You don't have to like it but I had to do what I did and I'm tired of feeling like I have to defend it to you or anyone.”
He doesn't know how but it derails into something bitter and chaotic as he ends up going on about how he was better off when he faced the world with low expectations, even if, in some ways, it was not entirely untrue. “And then you came in and brought your goddamned sunshine and rainbows and oh, let’s try this, Arthur, and your furniture is so dull, Arthur, and let me hang fancy paintings and your music is so shit, Arthur. Here, Arthur, let me spice up your life with this and that and the next thing and it will all be fucking zen. You never did get it.”
"If you hated it all so much, you could have just said so," Merlin snaps, hurt clear on his face.
Arthur doesn't know how to say that he didn't and he couldn't, not with you, but he feels drained and alone and it does not leave him. He thinks, here is Merlin with his electric blue bracelets and his Radiohead playing in the background-hell, here is Merlin who is fucking electric for crying out loud. Their minds have not, cannot, will not work the same way. How could Arthur for an instant expect him to get it? And here is something that neither of them can fix with anything they know or anything they have, and Arthur can only wonder where that leaves them.
|►►|2004
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