Apocabigbang: Fic: Postremus Regum Britanniae; Merlin; R; Chapter 6

[definewisdom]

Chapter 5: Law and Order


Chapter 6: Aesop and the Dragon

As they were walking the next day, Arthur and the others watched with horror as the tunnel behind them came crashing down. They ran out of the way and, when the crashing finally stopped, they turned round to find their way back completely blocked, but that wasn’t the worst that the tunnels had in store for them that day.

They were travelling again when they heard it first, a dull rumble not dissimilar to the roar of an underground train. They froze, staring around at one another in dismay and horror. It took them a second or two to realise that the tracks were still off, as they were standing on them, and that it couldn’t possibly be a train, but their breath still came quick and alarmed.

“What was that?” Gwen whispered to Morgana, who shook her head. Gwen seemed to take that as a lack of knowledge, but Arthur wasn’t convinced. The look in the strange woman’s eyes seemed to imply that she had a good idea what that was, but did not want to say. He drew in a deep breath, wondering what other monsters they were due to come across. Above ground there were so many, if they, or some other creatures, had found their way down here, then the rag-tag band of survivors were dead. They had nowhere left to run.

They walked on, more cautiously, huddling into a tighter group.

“I don’t like being blind,” Gawain said, uneasily, Arthur couldn’t help but agree with him. He caught Lance’s eye where he stood to the front of the group. His friend was raising his eyebrows in question and Arthur knew what he wanted to do despite the fact Lance didn’t speak a word.

He nodded, feeling something cold settle in the pit of his stomach, and watched as Lance moved forward, away from the group and into the darkness ahead.

“Lance?” Gwen called after him, but Arthur caught her arm as she started to move forward.

“Like Gawain said,” he whispered around, making sure that everyone could hear him, “I don’t like walking blind.”

“You told him to go?” Will asked, horrified.

“He volunteered,” Arthur replied, not even bothering to look at Will, he had got used to the man’s contrariness by now, no matter what it was Arthur said, Will would argue.

“So you’re willing to send your best friend to a possibly horrible death?”

“I’d do it to you,” Merlin murmured, before dodging one of Will’s hands that darted out on reflex.

“Better one person, than all of us,” Arthur told him. “Lance will tell us if it’s safe to go forwards.”

“And if it isn’t?” Gareth asked from next to Gawain. Arthur couldn’t read his face, not just because of the poor lighting.

“Then we go back,” Arthur told him, keeping his voice steady. His ears were straining for any sound whatsoever in front of them, but nothing was coming. They thought that he was too cold, too hard. He could see it in the accusing look of Gwen’s eyes, the scornful twist of Will’s mouth, the shocked rise of Jeff’s eyebrows. But, then again, Merlin looked resigned and gazed ahead into the dark with a sad look on his face, and Gawain and Gareth nodded, so some of them understood.

Arthur had not asked to lead them, he had not told them that he would be good at it, nor that he wanted it, but they had chosen it and he was going to do the best job he possibly could. He had to keep as many of them alive for as long as possible. It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t easy, but that was how things had to be.

It was not a happy thought, not something Arthur had ever wanted to entertain, but he had to. Death was a part of life these days and if he valued Lance’s life (his best friend’s life) over any of the others, then he might as well give up now. He would have gone himself, but Lance had offered, he had been near the front and he knew what might happen.

The guilt was clawing at his insides. Morgana’s hand came up to rest on his shoulder.

“It was the right decision,” she told him. It shouldn’t make him feel better: validation from a mad woman, but it did. He glanced at her, and he could just make out green-grey eyes in the light from Merlin’s torch, which shone directly at them. They were understanding and, if anything, proud.

“I’m sorry,” Will said, “but I don’t agree.”

“Says the person who said that, if necessary, we should resort to cannibalism,” Merlin commented sharply before anyone else could cut in. Arthur, whose mouth was open to speak, blinked in surprise. It was not something he would have thought to say. He had all his arguments set up, logical, reasonable, and brutal.

Will turned to glare at Merlin but, after taking a deep breath, he sighed and shook his head.

“I don’t like it,” he said.

“I don’t like any of this,” Merlin told him, and Arthur looked between the pair of them, wondering how much history there was to that friendship. The way that Merlin looked at his friend, like he knew every level of his thoughts, everything that crossed his mind, it made something twinge behind Arthur’s ribs. It was not jealousy, because what reason did he have to be jealous, he didn’t know Merlin, not really. Any vague attraction he may have felt at that bar was so far away now, beyond the boundary of this world and the world before. Before, it seemed both more real than this world and less real. It was fading away.

Maybe if he kept telling himself he wasn’t jealous then the strange and rather unpleasant feeling would go away.

“Right, apocalypse,” Will muttered. “Have to remember that.”

“I can’t forget it,” Arthur told him, but before Will could reply to the bitter comment, there was the noise of footsteps from ahead of them again and they all turned to see the glow of a torch approaching them.

“Lance?” Gwen called, stepping forwards, and Morgana and Will both reached out to hold her back.

But it was Lance, looking none the worse for wear as he returned. Arthur allowed himself a moment of relief when everyone else’s attention was elsewhere. He caught his friend’s eye and Lance smiled, shrugging, as though it was no big deal. The cold feeling did not leave the pit of his stomach, though - it lingered, like a cold, hard stone. He had made the decision once, he knew he would not hesitate to make it again and next time the outcome might not be as good.

“What was it?” he asked, moving forwards after everyone had seen for themselves that Lance was fine. The reminder that he was still alive would not do any harm.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he said, now fully lit by the collective light of everyone’s torches. He was looking more confused than happy and Arthur felt his instincts prickle again; there was something not quite right here. “There’s... I think it’s a dragon down there.”

The reaction was instantaneous. While they had been quiet before, the entire group froze in place, Arthur wasn’t sure whether anyone was even breathing. Then he realised that he wasn’t breathing either and forced himself to take a deep breath, as quietly as possible. A dragon down here. He remembered the charred corpses and the feel of fire hot beyond belief almost touching his back.

“We go back..,” he said, turning round.

“Wait,” Lance called out and, against his better judgement, Arthur waited. Lance was not given to stupidity, and he had come back alive. “I don’t think... I don’t think it’s a threat.”

“It’s a dragon,” Will said, as though that covered it.

“For once, I agree with Will,” Arthur said. There were nods around.

“I stood right in front of it and all it did was stare at me,” Lance told them. “You know we can’t go back, We’ll never get past the fall-in. and there aren’t any other exits between us and there.”

Arthur stared at him, his mouth open to protest, but he couldn’t see any way out. There might be some sort of entrance to the street, but in the darkness, he had no way of telling, without extreme luck. Otherwise there was no choice other than to risk the dragon. He hoped that Lance was right about it not being interested in baking them alive.

“Fine, I’ll go first,” he said, stepping forwards even as Lance protested. He stared him into submission. Lance had already given them enough warning for this, if Arthur was going to lead them forwards, then he was going to do them the courtesy of leading from the front.

‘First into battle, the last to retreat,’ he had read somewhere, once, though he could not for the life of him remember where. It had stuck though, somewhere in his mind, in the part that had thought it would be cool to be a warrior, honourable: the part that went to see martial arts films for the strange honour systems and relationships rather than for the fight scenes.

So he couldn’t turn back, couldn’t order them forwards and hang behind himself. He wasn’t built like that. If anyone was going to sacrifice their life then it was going to be him. Sometimes he hated that part of himself: he didn’t want to die. Oh God he didn’t want to die.

He felt as he imagined people walking to the gallows must, every step taking him closer to his doom.

Arthur wasn’t the sort of person to use words like doom, they sounded too melodramatic, but he felt that when you were walking through dark towards a dragon, doom might even be understating the fact.

“If I die,” Merlin muttered behind him, “I hope that I come back as a turtle.”

“Why a turtle?”

“I just like the animals,” he replied.

“He means that he had an unhealthy obsession with teenage mutant ninja turtles when he was younger,” Will corrected. There were several chuckles, mostly a little hysterical, among the group.

“You’re not going to die,” Morgana said with authority, Arthur wished he believed her. It probably said a lot about their motley crew that the most optimistic member was the mad woman.

“We’re screwed,” Tristan said, a twist of amusement in his tone.

“Oh come on,” Gawain said in a mutter, “you’re not as screwed as I am, at least you can run away.”

“You have wheels,” Tristan moaned, “you’re going to be faster than the rest of us.”

“Tristan,” Gwen said, a little scandalised, but Gawain did not seem upset.

“Believe me, my wheels are foiled by little things like my arms getting tired, or steps,” he told them, sighing. “I’m just meals on wheels to a dragon.”

“Like you’d ever let me live it down if you got eaten by a dragon,” Gareth muttered. They all sounded so casual, like discussing being eaten by a dragon was something they did every day, but there was an undercurrent that Arthur could just about hear. He wouldn’t have noticed at all if he didn’t feel exactly the same way. Pure blinding terror underneath their words, making them speak just that little bit faster, that bit too casual. It was as though they didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or run away.

And they were still walking towards a huge fire-breathing lizard.

Arthur felt the tug of déjà vu pulling at him, as though he had been here before. He remembered this feeling of helplessness, he remembered a dragon. It flashed across his mind, fire and stone, huge stone walls, falling down and a town burning. He could remember holding himself together with the knowledge he had now: someone had to stay calm and lead.

There was a strange sensation that he was not walking, but almost flying... no, galloping. He could feel the ghost of a horse under him and feel the ghost of wind on his face, whipping at his hair. He rode to his death, he knew. A shiver ran down his spine and he bit back a murmur of unease. He shook himself to pull himself out of the half-hallucination. For a second he thought he was still there, on a phantom horse approaching a phantom foe, but then he realised it wasn’t the unreal wind brushing at his forehead, but rather a different, warmer wind.

“Dragon breath,” he heard someone mutter from next to him, but he couldn’t tell who. His heart was beating too loudly to hear anything properly.

The group fell hushed again, the word ‘dragon’ echoing around their minds again and again.

Dragons used to be in story books or bad films. They used to be fantasies.

Arthur didn’t understand why reality had decided to turn itself on its head, but it had, and he was just going to have to cope with that. He set his shoulders and carried on walking forwards.

The first sign of the dragon they saw was the dim line of a claw. Arthur swallowed. It was just visible in the light of his torch, a long pale, curved line, tapering to an elegant point. He wondered if dragons ever disembowelled things, creatures... humans. With talons like that, they probably did.

He took a step forward, determined. This was the only way and, if Lance said it was safe...

“I don’t like dragons,” Will muttered, there was a murmur of agreement from everyone else.

Arthur could make out the line of a scaly leg now, shining slightly and reflecting the light. Fading into the darkness before it reached body, but above it...

He squinted into the darkness for a moment, trying to work out what he was seeing, a long, segmented tube, almost, except it seemed broader further away and it swayed slightly, there and back. It was curved round, almost like a strange water slide, in the underground.

Then it unfurled itself and became, very clearly, a neck, long and scaly, with larger scales underneath and, at the end of it - the end nearest to Arthur. Not very far away at all, barely five metres, there was a head. It hovered and swayed, staring back at Arthur.

This was it: the last moments of his life had come. He wasn’t unsurprised. With everything going on at the moment he had been expecting them, but now they were here he wanted to go back.

He kept staring, watching the dragon’s huge eyes and seeing the edge of huge teeth.

Arthur would be barely a mouthful to the beast. Their entire group would collectively be less than a couple of bites. It might not even notice that it had swallowed them. He shuddered and wondered whether it would swallow him whole, whether he would still be alive as it digested him.

That him from before came back, the version of him that was riding, always riding to his doom. It was a part of his mind he knew, the part that stared out of the windows in the office and thought that everything was so pointless. It told him that this was real, this here. The beating of his heart, the quickening of his breath and the fierce rush of pride that made him tilt his head up.

If you were going to die, he told himself, then you should do it properly.

Then the dragon opened its mouth.

Burnt to a cinder in a second was better than hours of stomach acid, Arthur told himself.

But no fire came, instead there was a curious whine from way back in the creature’s throat and it dropped its head to the ground, looking like a pathetic, scaly puppy rather than a blood-thirsty killer.

“It’s injured,” Merlin said, stepping forwards. Arthur reached to pull him back, but he was already out of reach, walking towards the overgrown killer puppy.

“Good,” he said, “let’s leave it to die.”

There was a strange slithering sound and the giant head cocked to one side, just like a dog. Arthur thought that maybe it understood every word he said. He swallowed deeply. They were all going to die.

Merlin was still moving forwards.

“Merlin,” he hissed, not really knowing why he was being quiet, but keeping his voice as a low whisper anyway. “Come back here, you idiot. That’s a sodding dragon if you hadn’t noticed.” He heard Will echo his sentiment with fewer words, behind him, most of them beginning with f.

“It’s hurt,” Merlin repeated.

“Which means that it’s not killing us, so I count that as a good thing,” Arthur replied.

He could feel the rest of the group at his back, watching what was happening with bated breath. This felt like a key moment, like they were watching him, weighing him up. They had chosen him as their leader and now they were regretting it.

If anything looked like it was going wrong, he would have to get the rest of them out of there, he told himself. Merlin would just have to fend for himself. If he was stupid enough to walk towards a monstrous killing machine then he only had himself to blame for any death, injury or psychological trauma he might fall victim to. Even as he thought it, he knew that it wouldn’t happen. There was something strange about Merlin, ever since he had seen him in that bar and had walked away, something that undeniably drew him towards the man even as he told himself he needed to back away. If anything happened, the first thing he would do would be run forwards to try and save the fool. He could see it now, him dying a heroic death saving an idiot from becoming Merlin en flambé.

“Merlin,” he growled in irritation, his voice felt like it echoed, but there was no sound, just a twinge in the back of his mind, his mouth using that tone, that word a dozen times before, a hundred times before. The same feeling of irritation, or annoyance, of fear for someone’s life… for Merlin’s life. It was like a dozen lots of déjà vu, hitting him at once.

“I’ll be fine,” Merlin insisted, taking another step forward. The dragon made a half hearted swipe at Merlin’s ridiculous hair cut and Arthur took an involuntary step forward.

“If I die saving your life then you had better name every one of your children after me,” he said under his breath.

“Not likely,” Will said, his voice cracking a little through the attempt at humour, “Merlin’s a ginormous bender, after all.”

“Remember what I said about the homophobic comments, Will,” Merlin replied. “I’m not the one who talked to Nicky, now, am I?” There was silence from Will. “Anyway, I’m bi, I might have children one day.”

It didn’t seem like the time for revelations of sexuality, though Arthur couldn’t deny that he was a little bit interested, but at the same time it seemed like the perfect time. There was an air of day time television chat show to it that seemed to help them all cope with the bizarre, unrealistic nature of everything. This was something so normal, so mundane, that it made the rest of the world a bit more manageable. It was something they could be interested in, something they could gossip about and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the elephant in the room, or the dragon in the underground as the case might be.

“It’s got something stuck in its wing.”

“Whatever you do, don’t pull it out,” Percival said, obviously trying to sound commanding, but failing miserably.

“Look, it hasn’t hurt us yet, has it?” Merlin pointed out.

“That might just mean that it’s too injured.”

“True, or it might mean that it’s not going to.”

“There’s no way to know that,” Gareth pointed out.

“Sometimes a little kindness,” Merlin dropped out of sight into the shadows and Arthur was moving forwards before he could even register having made a conscious decision to do so. He kept going until he was crouching next to Merlin, right near the dragon’s neck, by the fold of its wing. Up close the dragon was even bigger than Arthur had expected. It barely fit in the cramped tunnel.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he whispered furiously into Merlin’s ear. The man turned around, apparently surprised that Arthur had come so close. “It’s not just your life you are risking now, you know.”

“I just think that this is what I need to do,” Merlin told him with a shrug. “Do you ever have that feeling that there’s something about yourself that you don’t know?” Arthur didn’t reply. “There’s something about here and now that I don’t know, but whatever it is, it needs me to save this dragon, it needs me to do this.”

“If we die…”

Merlin grinned, his teeth shining bright in the light of Arthur’s torch.

“Then you have my permission to kill me,” he said flippantly.

He was right: there was something through the dragon’s wing, near where the spines of it joined together. The main part of the wing seemed to be made up of a membrane, thin and fragile, and a piece of masonry had pierced right through it.

“You know, if this immobilises them, then we might be in luck,” Arthur said, looking with more interest at the wound. “We don’t need to aim to kill them, just cripple them.”

“Right, and have all the fire-breathing killing machines on the ground with us and angry? Good idea,” Merlin said, putting his hands on the huge splinter of stone gently. “Can you hold it still?” he asked.

“It’s a dragon,” Arthur replied, deadpan. It was more than fifty times his size. If it wanted to move there was not a lot Arthur could do about it. Merlin ignored him and began to pull.

The dragon began to spasm, letting out a long keen, and Arthur leant in close to push against it, keep its flank still. Its flesh quivered under his hands, like a skittish horse, and the scales did not feel like he had expected them to feel. Instead, they were warm and hard but they gave beneath his hands. This was a creature of flesh and blood as much as it was a creature of magic.

Merlin gave a grunt of effort next to him and there was a sickening wet noise as the splinter pulled free. Arthur was reminded of those people, the smell of burning flesh, the feel of burning air on the back of his neck and he wanted to hurt this creature, he wanted to hit it and stab at it and rip its bloody wings right off. But Merlin was sitting next to him, grinning so proudly at having dragged that piece of stone out of its wing that he couldn’t bring himself to even raise a fist against it, let alone the gun he had tucked into his waistband.

It began to move, swaying around them, stepping between them and the others, twisting round on itself. On the other side of its bulk, Arthur could hear the rest of their group drawing out and cocking whatever weapons they had.

“Hold your fire,” he said, feeling like a general on a bad film. ‘hold your fire’? Who said ‘hold your fire’?

But they must have listened to him because no guns were fired, there was no battle or skirmish, just the continued ambling of the dragon along the railway lines, its head turned to him and Merlin and lowered in an unmistakable bow, before it began to move off again, disappearing into the dark.

Arthur did not know when he started to breathe properly again, but he knew when he felt Merlin’s hand on his shoulder and he knew when Lance came to stand next to them, almost shielding them from the rest of the group.

“What did you do that for?” Percival demanded, a question that was echoed in everyone else’s faces. “You just sent it back out there, onto the streets to kill more people.”

“Merlin, I know you’ve got a thing for strays but I thought even you would draw the line somewhere,” Will said.

“Look, it’s over with, it’s done,” Arthur told them, forcing himself to stand up, to step away from Merlin. He wondered how many of the great leaders of the past would have let their enemy go like that, when the enemy was completely at their mercy.

It had been the right thing to do, he told himself, and he didn’t even feel as though he was lying.

He remembered, dimly, as they walked along through the darkness once more, in hushed silence this time, something that had never happened. He remembered speaking words.

“I will not strike you while you are down,” his voice told him from the back of his mind. “A battle won dishonourably is a battle lost.”

“You and your damn honour,” Merlin said, except he didn’t, he was still walking alongside him, thin lipped and silent. “In a battle for your life anything goes. It’s not about honour, it’s about survival.”

“For a true knight,” Arthur said inside his own head, “there is no point in survival without honour.”

The memory faded away; maybe it was a film he had seen, a book he had read. Not a memory, not real. That had never happened. It was stress, stress and Morgana’s ramblings.

Maybe the nervous breakdown had not passed him by entirely.

He bumped his shoulder into Merlin’s lightly.

“I had better not live to regret that,” he said.

“I don’t think you will.”

*

Chapter 7: The Once and Future