merlin: still the new world [1/1]
still the new world
merlin/arthur
r
5,595
merlin loses arthur in time. it's easier than asking to have him hidden.
massive thanks to mumblemutter .
2005
The world is young, and Merlin within it, so when he sees the girl floating face-down in the canal he kicks off his shoes without thinking, shrugs off his jacket and leaps in, kicking through reeds and debris until his fingers close on the sodden fabric of her coat. He hauls backwards and the weight of her pushes him under just long enough for him to take a mouthful of dark, gritty water and choke on it.
He surfaces spluttering, tries to shake the water out of his eyes and grab hold of the girl again but. But.
"Get off," she says. "Christ. What was that for?" She shoves him, and Merlin has to kick to keep from going under, windmill his arms in the water in an attempt to keep afloat. The girl, though - the girl is still, effortlessly so, and Merlin has to concede that unless she's got a foot stuck in a shopping trolley, she's probably not going to need his help.
"My Lady?"
"Who do you think?" The Lady of the Lake glares at him again, then coughs wetly. A strand of reed or weed or something is hanging from her bottom lip. She frowns down at it and tugs. "Who else'd still be watching the boy?"
Not Merlin, apparently. "Arthur's here?"
The Lady tilts her head back, sticks two fingers down her throat and, with a strangled retching sound which ranks high on Merlin's list of things he plans to forget, pulls a tangled lump of green matter out of her throat. "Urgh," she says. And then, "He's stealing your shoes."
"He. Who?"
"Arthur," she says, nodding toward the bank. "And your phone."
Merlin flounders round just in time to see some scraggy-looking blond boy scooping up his things from the towpath. "Oi!" He shouts. "Hey! You can't just-” He tries to reach for the bank, grab fistfuls of the long grass there to pull himself up with, but every handful uproots itself from the mud as soon as he puts any weight on it.
"Ta very much for this," the boy says as he tucks Merlin's coat under his arm. He doesn't sound much like Arthur but his smirk is exactly the same. "Cheers." He gives a funny gesture, part salute and part wave, and jogs off down the bank.
"I." Merlin manages after a while. "He. My fucking keys were in there."
"Yeah. He's a bit of a shit this time round, to be honest."
"He was always a bit of a shit," Merlin mutters, and drags himself onto the bank.
Over
The field smells of blood.
The dead have all been moved now, even Mordred, but Merlin finds the last of the knights stood in the red snow round Arthur, silent and furious.
Elsevier gives him a look which says Shouldn't you be doing something useful? and another which says Please.
Elsevier's never asked him for anything before and it's that, more than anything, which convinces Merlin that it's time.
1293
"We don't believe in you."
There is a trio of children in Merlin's doorway, all trying to hide behind one another while looking like they're trying to step forward. Their leader is a bright-eyed, sour-faced boy with a stick hung from his belt like a sword. "You're not really a wizard," he informs Merlin, folding his arms across his chest and looking far more self-righteous than is healthy for a boy his age. "Mrs. Challener says. Mrs. Challener says just 'cos your face could turn milk, doesn't mean you're magic." His tone says, we have decided not to let you disappoint us.
Merlin smiles wearily. He finds himself doing more and more that way of late. "In that case," he says, doing his best to sound benevolent and mysterious rather than just old, "you can inform Mrs. Challener that I won't be letting her see the dragon."
The trio curl in on themselves and confer in overloud whispers (He's got a dragon - He's lying - He said - Shut up - He's not - Go on, ask) until the leader is pushed forward again, knuckles white where he's clutching at the stick in his belt. "We might believe you," he says generously, "if you let us see it."
"Is that so?"
"And if it flies." The stubborn set of Arthur's jaw is so familiar it makes Merlin ache.
"But of course. In that case, I shall have to take particularly good care of it." He stands, lumbers over to the fire and sweeps aside the ash to reveal the egg. It is warm and glowing and strangely soft, like a lungfish cocoon, and the children's eyes go wide with wonder.
The Lady
The Lady listens. The water carries the echoes of the shrill fussings of her sister; the slow steady thrum of the ancients, buried somewhere beyond belief and time; the industrious silence at the edges of the world, where something nameless is pretending not to press in.
She can hear the Green Man and the Mariner waiting out eternity in watchful curiosity, as constant and quiet as the singing of swords.
She can feel the ebb and flow of Emrys as he makes himself old and young again, trudging tirelessly through the ages, while in his wake -
While in his -
Nothing. There's nothing. She is going to kill him.
1349
Merlin is young, and surrounded by Christians and scientists. It’s fine. He doesn’t mind. Really. He’s even got himself a job.
Unfortunately, that job is carting rubbish and filth and, in an exciting new twist, plague victims, to the tip which is slowly taking over one of the banks of the Thames.
Even more unfortunately, he can find his way there by following the smell.
Entirely coincidentally, the boy who meets him at the gates on his first day is named Arthur.
"You're new."
"Yes."
"Are you simple?"
"Would it help?"
Arthur studies Merlin carefully, and seems to decide that this means yes. He puts down the barrow full of slurry he's carting toward the river, carefully blocking Merlin's way. "You're a volunteer."
"Yes."
"You're sure? You weren't offered this as, say, an alternative to gaol?"
Merlin sighs. This incarnation of Arthur is, apparently, not overly bright.
"You realise that no-one volunteers for this anymore? That four boys ran away last week because they'd rather starve than carry plague victims?"
"So I got here just in time." He moves to push past; Arthur shifts the barrow. Not entirely brain dead, then.
"Look - "
"Merlin."
"Merlin, look. Are you sure - absolutely sure - you're not an idiot?"
"I have an appointment."
"That proves nothing."
Deciding that Arthur's always going to be an insufferable prick, Merlin scrambles over the barrow and strides out toward the hut on the far side of the yard, where he assumes he'll find the Ward Chief. The ground is soft and slippery underfoot, the mud threatening to swallow his boots every time he tries to lift his feet. At some point, he knows, the slurry yard gives way to the Thames, but he can't quite tell where. The river and the land have blurred into a slow-moving mass of pungent, sucking silt, with the Ward Chief's hut balanced precariously on the last bit of relatively firm ground. Merlin approaches cautiously, telling himself it's ridiculous to think that putting too much weight on one side of the building will send it slumping into the river. Completely ridiculous. Idiotic, even.
The silt's probably thick enough for it to float on, anyway.
Arthur squelches doggedly after him, muttering darkly about plague and imbeciles and deserters until they force open the hut door and are greeted by the sight of a woman dressed in what could generously be described as rags, pouring what could generously be described as water onto the dying fire. Merlin can only think of one person who could seem so utterly, terrifyingly poised while covered in shit. He resists the urge to whimper, but only just.
"Who are you?"
"I'm the Ward Chief."
Arthur schools his face into the carefully blank expression of a man outranked by idiots. "You're a woman," he says, carefully, as if the Lady might not have noticed.
The Lady smiles. Arthur barely flinches. Merlin is impressed. "Such a keen young mind," she coos. "Arthur, is it?"
"Yes ma'am."
"Well, Arthur, we must promote you at once. Henceforth, you shall supervise the charnel-wagon. The collectors are to report to you."
Arthur looks vaguely sick. "The plague boys haven't been seen for a week, ma'am."
"Well then, you had best collect them. I shall send Merlin to warn the cemetery at Spittle Croft of your approach as soon as I have his scrawl on all the relevant papers." She smiles again.
Some deep, reptile part of Arthur's brain seems to remember what that smile means, what crossing the Lady of the Lake will inevitable lead to, and he backs out of the door with a barely-noticeable grimace and a surprisingly convincing bow. "Yes ma'am. Thank you."
Merlin is almost relieved, until he realises his is now alone. "Um," he tries. "You're you, then?"
"Yes, Emrys. And you, sadly, remain yourself." She sits down heavily behind the Ward Chief's desk. The hut rocks gently. "Enlighten me, Emrys. When the Dragon told you to leave Arthur to sleep under the hill, and to wait with him there until Albion's hour of need, and to only wake him if there was no other possible hope, was there a particular phrase which left you confused?"
"The Dragon -"
"Was uncharacteristically clear about this. I know, because I made him rehearse."
“And you thought I’d just what, do as I was told?” Merlin asks. Even to his own ears, he sounds suicidally petulant. “I expect that kind of thing from people who’ve read prophecies, but really. We’ve met.” Yes, adds the part of Merlin’s brain that still insists on campaigning for self-preservation. She showed you her collection of severed heads. Can we run yet?
The Lady looks at him as if she’s only just realised the scale of human stupidity. “He is the Once and Future King,” she says, incredulous. “He unites kingdoms, he saves lives, he ruins them. Allowing him to blunder through history just so you can get your end away is not acceptable.”
Tell her you haven’t! screams the oft-overlooked portion of Merlin’s brain. If only, sighs the rest.
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep him here and unimportant? Any conception at all? Him not knowing he’s significant doesn’t make him any less able to change the course of history on a whim. What on earth were you thinking? No, don’t tell me. It’s easier if I assume you’re incapable.”
“He wasn’t - ” Merlin tries. He’s not sure how to explain that Arthur’s sleep was not a quiet one; that he moved and spoke and looked younger than Merlin ever remembered; that every time he went to the tomb, Merlin felt the words coil on his tongue until one day there was no holding them back. “I didn’t know it would be like this,” he finishes lamely. “I thought he’d remember. I thought - I didn’t know he’d be new.”
The Lady sighs in a way is pitying and murderous at once. “He’s not a pet. He isn’t yours. You can’t…” she makes a vague gesture which Merlin assumes represents his and Arthur’s entire collective history. “If you keep saving him, he’ll matter. He can’t. Don’t make me hide him from you.”
1415
Merlin is still young, but it is difficult to tell at the moment.
Everyone looks the same by the second day, bloodied and dead-eyed. Merlin is lurching stubbornly across the field, refusing to fall more than actually walking. There's something horribly wrong with his shoulder; it's bloody and stiff and he can't really lift his arm but it doesn't hurt, and when he tries to think what that could mean the words skitter out of sight, out of mind, until all he can think of are childhood rhymes about fingers and spells for heavy lifting. His head hurts, or did, or will. He can't really remember.
He walks until he's at the camp, until young boys with blank expressions gather him up and bear him away to something which could be a medical tent or a burial pile - there are bodies laid out in crooked rows, men bleeding and groaning and trying to crawl out of formation as if to imitate death is to invite it and Merlin wants to say that nothing helps, that he's seen, he's lifted bodies from the street in that same stretched-out position, hands grasping for something that isn't worth reaching, but his head swims and the ground shifts as he's lain out and they are gone, gone and he cannot reach them.
He wakes some time later, after night has fallen, still lying in the same row but stiffer and sorer, with a clear enough head to know that that's a good sign. There's someone next to him now. Merlin can't see clearly - all the torches are at the other end of the line, where the men are livelier and whoever's passing for a doctor is more optimistic - but he can hear the sound of the other man shifting uncomfortably, hear laboured breathing. "What is that?" he asks, because how are you dying? seems rude.
"The smell?" The voice next to him is familiar and Merlin has to fight back a wave of nausea, a burst of sick laughter because this is probably the Lady's way of teaching him a lesson.
"It's foul."
"It's me. Well. It's whatever they fed me."
"Oh." If this were the old Arthur Merlin would think of something witty to say, but it's not. It's the new Arthur and Merlin's only just found him and now he's giving off the smell of garlic and decay, which means that's his intestines are punctured, which means that he's dying, which means that somewhere the Dragon is definitely, definitely thinking of Excalibur and laughing.
"'Oh'? That's it?" There is the sound of Arthur shifting, gasping, clamping down on a low, pained noise he doesn't want anyone to hear.
"You were expecting a speech?"
"I wasn't -" there's the clink of chain mail, a soft sound like tearing, "I wasn't expecting anything. Who are you, anyway?"
"Emrys. 'M an archer."
"Brecon man?"
"More or less."
"Still got all your fingers?"
"So far." Merlin's worried to find himself wiggling them, just to be sure. His arm almost feels whole again and he wonders, briefly, how he'll explain it. Maybe he'll leave before he has to.
"Good man." Arthur's using his Knights of Camelot Boys' Club voice. It's as annoying as it ever was.
"Where are you now?"
"France."
"I meant, where are you from?" Merlin still can't see, but he can hear Arthur looking at him like he's an idiot. "Stop that."
"Stop what? And I'm one of York's."
"One of?" It seems wrong somehow, the idea that Arthur is part of a multitude rather than a leader; that he is someone's at all, and someone else's in particular. It seems unfair that he’s dying without having been fiendishly significant.
"The expendable sons. He brought a handful of spares in case your French counterpart was particularly good. Or in case you were particularly bad, I suppose."
"I'm not."
"You're at the hopeless end of the row."
"Only because your lot let it turn into a brawl. You're aware that we get given a longbow and a cudgel? And that they have swords?"
"I'd noticed that last part, yes."
They lapse into silence after that because Merlin can't think of anything safe to say and Arthur is mostly concerned with not sounding like a dying man. He keeps making these stifled choking sounds which are too familiar but at the same time so alien that Merlin manages to be shocked by them, to be horrified by the fact that this can still happen to a man and even more so by the way Arthur hides from him, pulls away as if Merlin's some kind of stranger. He moves as much as he's able, stretching further as he body knits itself back together. Arthur isn't close enough to touch by accident.
"There was this man I knew," Merlin hears himself saying eventually, when Arthur isn't quite managing to be quiet anymore. "Not knew. Knew of, fought. Mordred. Not a Brecon man. Anyway, I remember fighting him and I remember you - I remember York's men - and the looks on your faces and the way you carried yourself and spoke, I remember, it was long ago but I knew, I knew you were a good man and a great man and I have seen you, Arthur Pendragon, I have seen you do great things and you have to -. It's. It's important that you understand that you were something wonderful, and that you will be, and -"
Arthur makes a sound which could be laughter or disdain or nothing, and then is quiet.
Merlin can't reach him. Not quite.
Under
Merlin loses Arthur, in time.
He's easy to keep track of at first, while his death is recent enough to rumour, while he's still believed in, while the child that's the spitting image of him (first in Hastings, then in Aberystwyth, and once in Ealdor of all places) is recognised and commented on and held in superstitious awe. But people die and boundaries change and the Old becomes irrevocably New, until Merlin's doing little more than chasing shadows. Until he's not even doing that.
1751
Merlin has ventured into middle age, and has discovered the joy of patronising the arts to shock the neighbours.
It is a short-lived joy: he empties his stomach over an orange-girl during the fourth act of Henry V, just as Arthur begins to wax lyrical about the glory men will gain from a battle he doesn’t remember dying in.
“He’s better when he’s being funny,” the orange-girl promises.
Under
Merlin loses Arthur in time. It’s easier than asking to have him hidden.
He is out in the world somewhere, dangerous and secretive and impossible to save, and the thing under the hill barely even wears his face. Its stillness is no less terrible for that.
1917
Merlin is older than Arthur, though not by much. It is disconcerting.
What’s more disconcerting is that, even though Merlin has dealt with Arthur coming apart a thousand times (when Uther died, when Morgana left, when Mordred arrived, the thousand day-to-day tragedies of a kingdom at war), Arthur doesn’t remember him. He doesn’t even find Merlin’s presence inexplicably comforting. Instead, he insists on treating Merlin like any other doctor, meaning he spends all of their allotted time together staring grimly at a point just over Merlin’s shoulder and refusing to speak. It’s not that he doesn’t communicate - there are plenty of raised eyebrows and long-suffering sighs and hastily written notes saying Are you sure you’re qualified? in Arthur’s insolently neat hand - it’s just that he won’t tell Merlin anything. Even the original Arthur’s admission-by-omission strategy had been better than this.
Or rather, it had been more universal. Brooding was something the original Arthur just did, like shooting before thinking and talking without thinking at all. This Arthur gives Merlin the cold shoulder and then goes and sits on the wall at the bottom of the hospital garden with Adam Glass, a private from Hull who’s teaching him to slouch. Arthur is terrible at looking insubordinate. His actions, yes, fine: Merlin is willing to concede that he's never seen Arthur with his blue armband on in or out of the hospital; that he's never known anyone who wasn't mute give so many doctors the silent treatment; that Arthur seems to be completely unaware of the meaning of "curfew" or "confined to grounds". His posture, however, needs work. Every ten minutes or so he'll sit up, face blank, before remembering that he's meant to be miserable and forcing himself to slump again. Adam offers pointers. Arthur rolls the two of them cigarettes. Merlin watches from his office window and hates them both.
Well, no. He hates the way that Arthur is able to fill the gap between them with someone else, that he doesn’t look at Merlin and see something of himself which has been missing, that he doesn’t look at Adam’s twisted, half-burned face and think immediately of Edwin every time.
Knowing it isn’t Arthur’s fault doesn’t make it any easier not to punch him in the face, doesn’t stop Merlin wanting to curl round him and press kisses against his spine until he unfurls, shaking and panting and falling apart in telling silence.
1966
They collide in the street, swaying drunkenly into one another, and Arthur throws an arm round Merlin’s shoulder in a way which is probably meant to support him but mostly just pulls him into a knee buckling near-fall. Arthur is cheering, a long, wordless noise which might have started as a song but is now just a rallying cry. He’s got one arm round Merlin, who he’s never met before, and the other around a bemused-looking boy who he seems to have collected in a similar way. He grins at them both between verses of the unsong, bright and joyous and absolutely fucking plastered.
He smells of sweat and beer and sunshine; the weight of his arm is warm and familiar and even the song he isn’t managing to sing sounds like something from the old days, all long vowels and melodramatic lows.
Merlin laughs back, tips his head towards the sun and lets out the most undignified, gleeful noise of his long life.
The Other Woman
Merlin follows Arthur. Not in the slow, tragic way he has done for centuries now, but with the kind of dedicated mania usually only seen in detective films. He rents a flat near Arthur’s house. He sits three seats away from him on the tube every morning and eats lunch in Arthur’s factory’s canteen. Every Saturday he feigns an interest in QPR and every Sunday he installs himself at the bar of the Dog and Crown and peers at Arthur over a newspaper as he chats to the regulars.
Sooner or later, they have to run into each other. Sooner or later, Arthur will say You look familiar and Merlin will remind him of staggering drunkenly away from Wembley and they’ll laugh and it will be enough.
Today, sadly, doesn’t seem to be that day. Arthur is later than usual, so Merlin is killing time at the bar, re-reading the same sentence of financial news over and over while watching the blind woman at the corner table knit at an astonishing speed and wondering if his Sunday tactics can lead to anywhere but alcoholism.
The blind woman turns and fixes her blank, milky eyes on him. “It’s rude to stare,” she says, and Merlin makes a sort of flustered apologetic noise and tries to hide behind his newspaper. “If you’d been brought up anywhere near properly,” she continues, “you would have done the gentlemanly thing and bought me a dry sherry.”
“I would?” Merlin ventures. The woman raises an eyebrow. “I would. Yes. Of course. Obviously.” He buys the drink and takes it over to her, holding it at arm’s length and putting it down as far from her as possible, because the way she manages to follow his movements exactly is nothing short of sinister.
“Now, now, don’t be shy.” She pats the seat next to her. “Sit.”
“I really - ”
“Sit, Merlin. And pass me my bag.”
Merlin hasn’t used that name for a long time, and his first instinct is to get away from this person, whoever she is, before some kind of humiliating public magic happens; his second, much stronger one is to find out what he wants and then send her far, far away from here to get it. He sits.
“Bag.”
“Yes, bag. Sorry.” He hefts a surprisingly weighty carpetbag onto the table. “Can you find the - ”
The woman puts her hand straight to the catch and unfastens. “I’m not an invalid,” she says, curtly, folding up her knitting and placing it inside. “Here, take this. And clear the next table, we’ll need to spread it out a bit.”
Merlin takes the edge of the fabric she pulls out of the bag, and as he unfolds it he sees that it’s some kind of vast tapestry, hundreds of tiny figures rendered in excruciating detail. One of them looks rather a lot like Merlin’s line manager, and another is obviously the Lady, radiating an air of altruistic sociopathy even when she’s three inches tall and embroidered. “What is it?”
“It is - roughly, anyway - December ’51 to March ’73,” the blind woman says. “Wait. Stop. Now.” She feels across the fabric, her fingers scratching over faces with too-real expressions and words too small to read until they come to rest on the man who looks like Merlin’s manager. “This is your line manager,” she says.
“Oh God,” says Merlin, wishing his was considerably more drunk or considerably less rusty in the wizardry department. Why was it always the vulnerable-looking ones? And why did they always find him at his lowest, most stalkerly ebb?
“He’s giving you a talking-to, like he did last Tuesday, about your recent tardiness.”
Merlin blinks. Evil creatures have never shown much interest in his day-to-day life before. “Look,” he tries, “if this is your idea of intimidating me, I’d rather we just skipped to the duel. Please.”
“It’s rude to interrupt, dear. Now, as I was saying…” her fingers scrabble back across the tapestry and alight on what looks suspiciously like a cross-stitching of Merlin’s landlord. “This is you, last month, failing to pay your rent. And if you look over by the ashtray, you’ll see yourself next month, unemployed and evicted. What you won’t find,” she pauses to sip on her sherry and Merlin can’t help but think she’s doing this on purpose, “not if you look over this entire thing with a magnifying glass, is you and your young gentleman becoming firm friends. You don’t even become acquaintances, and this goes all the way to nineteen seventy three.”
This is not a subject Evil has attempted to broach with Merlin before, at least not in so sympathetic a way. “Who are you?”
The woman’s expression softens. “I’m the nicer of the Ladies,” she says, taking another delicate sip, “and the one who has had her head turned by a handsome young man in armour most often, so I know that of which I speak.”
“You’re not here to sacrifice anyone, are you?”
“No, Merlin. I’m here to tell you to stop moping and find your self a hobby, or at the very least another young man. You have wasted a remarkable amount of life.” She flashes him a brittle, knowing smile. “Now, help me put this away. I want it folding neatly.”
1984
Merlin is young, and in the kind of club where it’s too loud to hear anything, even the music. His chest is shaking in time to a beat he couldn’t make out otherwise, and he’s drinking something which can only make him sick. He doesn’t see the point of this era, particularly, but he enjoys it anyway.
The boy - he looks hopelessly like a boy, Merlin thinks - is all white teeth and sweat-damp hair and golden even in neon lights, and he’s grinning like a lunatic and Merlin’s grinning back and this thing, this fucking colourful creature presses too close and says, “Do I know you?”
“What?”
“I think I know you.”
“I can’t hear you,” Merlin shouts back, and the golden boy laughs and cups Merlin’s face and presses their lips together like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
He’s taken to wearing rings again. They feel the same against Merlin’s skin as they always did, heavy and warm and hard. The familiarity of it is dizzying, disorientating, until Merlin’s pressed up against the wall of a toilet cubicle with Arthur’s mouth wrapped round his dick, wanting to say “I know you” and “I followed you” and “I am everything you will ever need and I know because I’ve seen,” but then Arthur does something obscene with his tongue and pushes another finger in and all Merlin can manage is: “Fuck, Arthur, Jesus, shit,” as he comes hard, fingers tight in Arthur’s hair.
After a long moment in which Merlin struggles to remember how to breathe, Arthur rocks back on his heels. “See?” he smirks. “Told you you knew me.”
Merlin gapes for a moment, then laughs. “Oh God,” he manages. “You’re such a shit.”
Arthur laughs and grabs Merlin’s wrist and it’s like there’s no time between them at all.
The Dragon
“You can’t just expect me to leave him!”
“The web of fate is cast wide, young warlock. It does not answer to me alone.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
The Dragon looks disgruntled.
“What?” Merlin asks. “He’s my destiny. You told me I have to protect him. Now you’re telling me he has to die?”
”As do all mortal things.”
Merlin has heard this message before. He has not heeded it.
“Well,” the Dragon tries, “not die as such.”
Under
There is nothing in the end, not even bones. Only Merlin, wrapped round a memory of a dream of a life, or some other permutation of the three. Even the names fade eventually. There is just space and time and Merlin sleeps through it all, blank and hopeful.
Over
The world is old, and Merlin finally sleeps somewhere under it, resigned to waiting out an eternity of repetition alone.
Typically, this is when everything changes.
It's the soldiers who hear it first. The echoes through the earth and the shrill cries; the visions at the edges of fraying minds which all speak of the same thing; the slow, steady thrum of something ancient beyond belief.
There’s a rumour in the prisons of a man two doors down and on the killing fields of a man who died last week, or will next. Sometimes there’s talk of someone who didn’t die at all, who should have but who walked out of the fire stern-faced and started giving orders, of someone who walked out of the fire laughing. Of someone who walked home. This last group sound particularly crazy but somehow never look it.
(Merlin doesn’t mean to dream but can’t help it. He dreams of crowds, of Arthur at the crown of the hill, glowing with certainty, a thousand faces turned toward his warmth).
The rumours inevitably deteriorate into news: survivors are recast as escapees, deserters as fugitives, unknown quantities as terrorist cults. A terrifyingly poised woman appears on television three times a day and explains in a deep, clear voice that there have been absolutely no miraculous recoveries or inexplicable escapes and that the people who have been leaving their homes and jobs and taking their families to live in the wilderness are very, very wrong and probably non-existent. It is difficult to hear her speak and not see the place in your head: startlingly green fields bordered by ancient, gnarled trees which have somehow survived the rain; rows of tents and makeshift houses full of wide-eyed, joyful people who seem to be living off hope alone; ex-soldiers who seem suddenly light again, a guard rather then a threat.
It is difficult to be see the place and not want to be there.
It is difficult to be there and not want to dig.
The people who aren’t in this place that isn’t there, the people who the sentries haven’t gone looking for and didn’t not find, they all say the earth sings with hope.
Under
Merlin dreams of the Lady and wakes up underground. The tomb has gone, taking Arthur with it: Merlin is cold and filthy and alone in a cave which seems to be crumbling. The roof is a web of hairline cracks, the light breaking through in single, strained shafts and then faster, stronger, until Merlin knows with horrible certainty that something has gone awfully wrong, that someone is coming for him. He can hear voices muttering, human ones, living ones, and he hasn’t spoken to anything but the earth in so long he can’t remember how.
He tries to tell the people this as they climb down, but his voice is thick with disuse and he can’t make them understand. They lift him gently, carry him outside with the kind of care usually reserved for the dying or the newly born. Everything is too bright and too warm and too loud and not really enough; Merlin can’t tell if he wants to hide or just bury his face in the nearest person’s collar and breathe them in until he remembers how being human is supposed to feel. “Let me,” he manages to say, “put me down, I need to - ”
They lower him onto his feet, his arms still looped round two strangers’ shoulders as he takes one shaking step then another. He edges his way up what’s left of the hill, almost blind in the light, working mostly by touch and hope until he feels someone next to him, hands on his face, rings heavy and warm and hard, and suddenly he can see everything, anything.
From here he can remake the world.