Timshel -- Epilogue
Timshel
And you have your choices / And these are what make man great / His ladder to the stars
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EPILOGUE
Life doesn't really do happy endings, and it won't be any different for Arthur and Merlin. There will be sadness, and heartbreak, and betrayal, just as in every life. But somewhere in the middle, there will be wonderful things, too, for all of them.
Gwen and Lance will probably have the most success at avoiding the bad stuff. There will be, of course, several chubby-kneed, curly-haired babies, and a wedding, and dozens of domestics (all held at first in sing-song voices, and later on, in quiet, seething hisses, because the kids are around) which actually serve to stop things from getting boring and have, after all, a dear familiarity all of their own. Morgana and Leon will do the opposite; years of on-again, off-again, her hot temper and his stubbornness stopping them from ever properly settling down; but after a long period apart, their temperaments will soften enough for them to come to some sort of compromise, at least for a while.
Arthur will go back to work, of course, and it will be occasionally stifling, and his relationship with his father will remain fractious at the best of times, but the Sunday dinners -- at first just the three of them, later on incorporating Gwen and Lance, Morgana, sometimes Leon, and even later, their various families -- will continue, and when Uther passes away that will bring Arthur some comfort in the face of a grief that leaves him more bereft than he could ever have imagined. Inheriting the business will prevent him taking up carpentry as an occupation, but he will still dabble, and when Gwen and Lance present baby number two (Gareth, with a stubborn little mouth and a fondness for wrapping a sticky fist around Arthur's fingers) he will disappear to the shed and return two weeks later, triumphant, with a sturdy crib, decorated with hand-carved ducks. And Camelot won't feel like a burden any more, not most of the time, because it will no longer be his life, no longer be his sole reason for existing; not with Gareth and Merlin and everyone else tucked carefully into his heart.
Merlin -- Merlin will find his place, eventually. It will take some time; he's too hot-headed, too opinionated to stay anywhere for too long, but one day he'll settle down into a job that might not be changing the world in exactly the way he would have wanted to, but he'll be happy anyway. And yes, he will spend a long time wondering what he's here for, looking for his destiny in the furthest corners of the world, with that same nagging feeling still plaguing him. But then he will wake up on his thirty-eighth birthday to find Arthur nervously presenting him with a book of Merlin's own writing, a book he's had hand-bound. And it will be a combination of the gesture, and the way the morning light falls on Arthur's face, and the knowledge that even after all these years Arthur is still capable of surprising him -- something in that will make him realise, sudden and soft and sure, that oh, it was here -- here all along.
And one autumn, not long before he dies, Uther will give Arthur a photograph album filled with pictures of his mother. Arthur will be brought to his knees by it, and the afternoon he spends pouring over it will be filled with the strangest mixture of anger and regret and love, and when Merlin comes home that evening Arthur will hide the photographs without really knowing why. He will never show them to Merlin, but Merlin will notice the change even if he doesn't understand the reason; and it will be a calmer Arthur, a wiser Arthur, but a somehow sadder one that shares his bed from that night onwards.
And all the while, Arthur and Merlin will be falling in love, and out of it, a bit, and back again.
There will be holidays where Merlin wants to go to the museums and the art galleries while Arthur just wants to lie on the beach; romantic meals that Arthur will spoil by refusing to switch off his Blackberry; forgotten birthdays and half-hearted anniversaries and broken promises. They will fight and throw accusations and break each other's hearts in bitter flashes of cruelty neither of them ever suspected they were capable of.
But there will also be times where they stay up talking all night, even when they've been together for years and have started wondering what there could be left to say, and times where Merlin makes Arthur laugh so hard his sides ache, and times when Arthur does something that touches Merlin so deeply he can hardly bring himself to admit it.
There will be a day after many long years where they take their usual walk by the Thames and something about the evening light will remind them both, and although they won't put it into words, they will both stand for a moment, throats suddenly full, fingers curling tighter around each other as they remember.
It will never be easy -- it never was. Some days they will meet in the middle, and some days they will still feel poles apart. And sometimes they'll wonder why they're doing it, why they're working so hard at it, when it feels so much easier to give up. But in the end it will always come down to one thing: a choice. And it doesn't matter if they're in the middle of the good times or the hard times or even just the ordinary times -- they will always end up choosing each other.
And Merlin will think, at the end of it all, that it was enough just to keep on making that choice, to keep going, to be together; and his last conscious thought before slipping into the final sleep will be to wonder, to marvel, at just how blessed they both were.
-fin-
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