FIC: She Dreams With an Open Heart (Arthur/Gwen, PG) 12ii/13
She Dreams With an Open Heart- Part Twelve
Rating: PG
Pairings: Gwen/Arthur, Morgana/Merlin, but very much a OT4 piece.
Disclaimer: Merlin belongs to the Beeb. Certain aspects of this is from Doctor Who Series Five. Cut text from Adele's Someone Like You.
Summary: Nothing is ever forgotten, not completely. When a tragedy occurs, Gwen finds herself in a new kingdom, with no recollection of her life in Camelot. The presence of a mysterious person is triggering her memory, but meanwhile, an injured man turns up, whom she seems to have a great affinity for. But why is she here? Who is the person she keeps on seeing? And why can’t she remember a thing? AU after series two.
A/N: Many thanks to _autumncolours for slowly but surely giving me the powers to wield a semi-colon.
Prologue/ Part One/ Part Two/ Part Three / Part Four / Part Five/ Part Six/ Part Seven/ Part Eight/ Part Nine/ Part Ten/ Part Eleven
Part Twelve a
+++{C}{C}{C}
It’s Merlin and Morgana who take matters in their own hands and make Arthur decide the next course of action.
“We’ve been here too long,” Merlin states, as the three of them sit on the hill in a meeting of sorts.
“You’ve been here a week,” Arthur murmurs, but even he knows that that is too long. How many more people of Camelot have died in their absence?
“I think we need to return as soon as we can.” There’s a note of urgency in Merlin’s voice and it doesn’t go unnoticed by Arthur.
“What about Gwen?”
Morgana shakes her head. “She wouldn’t be willing to return back to Camelot, at least not right now.”
“I don’t want to leave without her,” Arthur adamantly declares.
Merlin sighs. “Even if Gwen was willing to return home, would you really be willing to bring her to Camelot in its current state?”
“No,” Arthur immediately replies.
Merlin studies his friend’s face, picking up on the things that Arthur hasn’t voiced. “You mean you would rather stay here than return to Camelot?”
“No!” Arthur’s response is quicker than before. He winces. “Yes,” he admits. “I don’t know.”
“I could return without you,” Merlin volunteers, but his reluctance is evident.
Arthur shakes his head. “You’re a good wizard, Merlin and you have fought admirably and are well regarded by the people, but they need someone to round them up, to give them hope, to help those who need it and to give them back their kingdom. I’m their King, I should be the one doing those things; I should be the one who finds out if there is a kingdom left to return to and to make sure that there’s no enemy left.”
“If you’re worried about Gwen, I can always stay here and look out for her,” Morgana supplies.
Arthur casts her a wry smile. “I kind of hoped that you would return and maybe help us.”
Morgana looks a little startled, as though surprised that Arthur would ever wish such a thing, but she quickly recovers and smiles at him in return. “You know I would, but I believe I am the last person that Camelot needs to see right now. I would only unsettle the people further.”
“But you will come back one day, won’t you?” Merlin asks earnestly.
“I hope so,” she replies, though in all honesty, she is uncertain whether this is possible. She has done what she could to atone for her mistakes in order to earn her friends’ forgiveness, but the people of Camelot are a different matter. They never understood her when she was just the former King’s ward; there is little doubt that they will understand her now that they know she is a witch who has committed great evils.
“I am grateful for you looking out for Gwen, Morgana, and I respect your decision. I guess I am just reluctant to leave her, having already left her here once before.”
She looks at Arthur with sympathy. “Gwen will always be here, Arthur, but I fear Camelot won’t be. You must go and settle things there. When they are fixed then you can return here. Who knows, Gwen might be ready to listen then.”
“But what if I’m gone another year? Or worse, I’m killed?” He’s not sure he even has the strength length to wield a sword, and his weakness makes him vulnerable.
“Don’t think like that. You will triumph in rebuilding Camelot and defeating its enemies and you will return here soon.”
Arthur continues to look uncertain even with Morgana’s reassurances and lets out a sigh as he contemplates his options. He knows that if he continued to loiter here for another week - or a month, or even a year - Gwen would be slow in warming to him, he would have nothing to do except wallow in self-pity and Camelot might wither away as a result of his inaction. And he would never forgive himself if that happened. But if he returned to Camelot, he would be abandoning Gwen once more and to him that seemed like he was failing her all over again, even if this time she held no expectations for him.
“I will return to Camelot tomorrow,” he decides, and watches as Merlin and Morgana look relieved. “But I must talk to Gwen before I leave.”
He casts a glance at Morgana who looks hesitant, yet she knows that Arthur needs to do this to ease his burdens. Gwen might not be ready to see him and Morgana believes that she will never feel ready. Tomorrow, Arthur will return to Camelot and there is the tiniest chance he might not return. If she let Arthur go without him saying what he needed to say, then she’d never be able to live with that. Slowly, she nods and Arthur breathes a sigh of relief.
+
The next day, Arthur walks over to see Gwen. He finds it slightly ridiculous that it’s only now, when he’s about to leave, that he’s thought of the words that might get through to her. He’s nervous though: he’s always valued Gwen’s opinion above all others and he’s scared that she will throw what he has to say straight back at her. He fears her rejection far greater than his return to Camelot.
Arthur tries to hold his head up, resisting the urge to let it drop with the heavy weight of trepidation and instead follows the path of light offered by the sun rising above Gwen’s house. It’s a beautiful sight and for a moment he just stops and watches the sun as it begins its ascent through the sky. Even the sunrises seem more glorious here.
Morgana opens the door as he draws closer and greets him with a reassuring smile.
He smiles in return. “Is Gwen awake?” he asks.
Morgan nods. “She’s been awake for a while. I did tell her you wished to talk to her, but she retreated back into her room.”
“Oh.” It is hardly promising news. He wavers for a moment, debating whether to persevere or simply leave without a word to Gwen. That way, he can risk not getting burnt by her reaction and can head for Camelot without her rejection tormenting his every move.
Coward, he chides.
“Just because she won’t see you doesn’t mean she won’t listen. She’s still hurting but she cares for you- I’m sure of it.”
Arthur nods mutely and he looks behind Morgana, towards the direction of Gwen’s room. He’s faced many terrifying things in his short life: horrifying beasts with magical powers, vengeful wizards and witches, creatures resurrected from the dead and terse battle after terse battle, and he always prided himself on containing any fear he might have held. Yet now, fear rages through his blood and threatens to make him crumble. His heart pounds at an alarming rate and Morgana clasps his hands to stop them from trembling.
He fears Gwen’s reaction. He fears that he will pour his heart out to her and give her everything he has to offer and she will refuse to take it.
Morgana guides him inside the house and gently pushes him ahead. He walks a few steps before turning back to look at her.
This is my final chance with her, isn’t it?
He’s barely recuperated from his previous battle. If he goes back now, it won’t take much for an enemy to strike him down. Morgana’s reassurances aside, he believes he’ll be returning home to face his death.
But Morgana doesn’t hear his unspoken question. She just looks at him with faith in her eyes, as though he won’t fail spectacularly with Gwen and as though he won’t return home only to never come back to Souhaiter.
+
He stands outside Gwen’s door, nervously wondering what to do next. Tentatively, he brings his hand to the door and knocks gently.
“Guinevere?” he calls out. “It’s Arthur.”
He’s greeted with silence, as he knew he would be.
He tries again. “May I talk to you?”
He waits a few agonisingly long minutes. Still nothing.
His hand hovers over the doorknob and he contemplates entering without being asked. But if Gwen wanted him in her personal space, she would have made it known by now. He suddenly grapples with the irrational fear that instead of Gwen simply refusing to face him, she’s long since bolted out of her window and gone as far away from him as she can get.
He looks at Morgana who still stands by the entrance of the house. The encouraging look she gives him quells his anxieties and then she turns to leave, giving him privacy.
Arthur turns his attention back to the door. “Gwen, I really need to talk to you and I know how much you don’t want me to, but you don’t have to answer me. You just have to listen. Please. I have to return to Camelot today and I’m uncertain whether I’ll make it back.” He can’t stop his voice from wavering and revealing his vulnerability.
He listens for a moment and thinks he hears a rustling noise. When he then hears nothing, he thinks he must have imagined it.
He lets out a sigh, resigning himself to the fact that she refuses to face him and thus he will have to converse with a door.
Closing his eyes, he slides down so he is sitting on the ground, with his head leaning against the wooden panel of the door. His hands tangle together and he wonders what to say first. Does he start at the beginning with the story of his betrayal, the worst part? Or the middle, the part she knows only vaguely? Or perhaps he should begin with the ending, the bit about how the truth came out and he lost everything, and how he now has to leave when he fervently wishes he could stay and make amends.
Eyes opening, he takes a breath and starts where his thoughts take him:
“I should have known that you wouldn’t stay inside the castle when Morgana finally reappeared in Camelot. I should have known you well enough to realise that you would want to see her, because you never did believe that she was evil. Maybe I should have locked you inside my chamber. You would have hated me, I know it. But better for you to hate me like that than for you to come out, to die and hate me even more when I made the hardest decision I was ever faced with. I could have let you come out with us, but I was being protective and couldn’t stand the thought of you being caught up in the raging violence I knew would follow. That doesn’t mean I don’t think you can hold your own; you’re the strongest woman I know, and given the chance you’d probably take out a whole army single-handedly. But I feared that if Morgana saw you fighting alongside us, she would have seen that as a sign that you were against her, and that betrayal would have stung her no matter how much she cared for you.”
He pauses for a moment, the foolishness of talking to nothing quickly abating as he immerses himself with what he has to say.
“I can’t forget what happened that day, Guinevere. It plays over and over again in my mind. Seeing you fall down and die was the worst thing I’ve ever experienced. You died trying to save me and I will never forgive myself for that. The sound of your dying screams haunt me when I sleep and even when I’m awake I can’t be rid of them.”
He finds his eyes growing moist just by revisiting those memories; even now, when he knows Gwen is alive and well, the scenes of her dying elicits the most unbearable kind of pain, as though he’s lost something he has no chance of ever regaining.
He takes a few breaths before he carries on. “Merlin tried so hard to save you. At first, I was certain he would succeed. He has magic, how could he not? But the strangest thing happened: Merlin could not save you.” He can’t hide the bemusement from his voice. “Maybe he was too weak from fighting Morgana or maybe there are some things that even he can’t do. Whatever it was, all I knew was that you were dead. We were alive and you were dead and nothing seemed to be able to change that. The two of us held your hands for hours as though it would bring you back. We ended up falling asleep and when we awoke, you were alive!
“Even now I don’t understand how that happened. All I know is that we needed a miracle to bring you back, and then all of a sudden there you were- alive.
“I think in those subsequent days, I was so scared that somebody would come and snatch you away. I believed you weren’t really supposed to have come back to life and that sooner or later, some higher being would have realised this and taken you from me again.
“If I was protective over you before, your death made me even more so. It made me paranoid when I was already desperate; blind when I was already tired and weak. I wanted you to be safe, but how could you possibly be safe in Camelot? The threat of Morgause still raged on and I had no clue where Morgana was. For all I knew, she was waiting around the corner for you. I know none of that will excuse the decision I eventually made, but I need you to know how much I needed you out of harm’s way. Ordering Merlin to erase your memories is probably the cruellest and hardest thing I’ve ever done and yes, I regret that. But I don’t think you would have come here voluntarily and I was rapidly running out of time.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t realise the consequence of my actions and I vehemently hate what I’ve done to you. Countless of times I’ve wished I could make that choice again, but the thing is by making that decision I ensured that out here you were safe and I believe with all my heart that it would have been a different story if you had remained in Camelot, and I valued your life far greater than your opinion of me. So yes, I would - with much regret - have made that same decision; I still would have sent you here, but would have tried to come up with a plan that wasn’t so painful.”
Arthur lets out a sigh and says, “I don’t honestly know what I should have done instead. You were always the clever one; I have no doubt that if the roles were reversed, you would have come up with the perfect solution.”
Arthur falls into a contemplative silence and barely notices her lack of response, so lost is he is the what-ifs and should-have-beens.
“Life without you was horrible and I don’t know how I survived that year in your absence. The moment Merlin and I returned from Souhaiter, I was possessed with the need to go back and collect you, but things in Camelot quickly deteriorated. Morgause came out of nowhere and killed my father. I know we were all expecting her to do so - she’d been threatening such action for a long time - but it was still a shock when it happened.”
The image of his father comes to his mind. He knows Uther wasn’t the perfect king, but he was his father and Arthur can’t fault him for that. Grief fills him. Even now it’s hard to accept that Camelot is his for the ruling when his father was so harshly taken from him.
“If I was mess before his death, afterwards I was a complete wreck, but I didn’t have time to grieve. Cenred’s threat of attack increased and I had to deploy my men to fight and I followed with my own battalion to face him myself. Merlin stayed in Camelot to defend it against Morgause, who was desperate to have it as her own.
“I won’t even tell you what I saw and what I had to endure. And if you knew the things I had to do to defend my kingdom, you would surely hate me even more than you do now. I was a monster on that battlefield, Guinevere. I can’t even admit to myself what I did and I’m just glad you weren’t there to see me. I doubt you would have recognised who I was.
“Then the final battle came. We were so convinced victory would be ours for we had disabled most of Cenred’s men and had to fight only him and the last of his men. But we had grown complacent, and that would be our downfall. Our weapons could not match theirs; somehow, Morgause must have bestowed them with magical weapons that were stronger than ours. We only had the weapons Merlin had given us. But because he had made them when my father was still alive, the weapons were not as strong as they could have been- my father was in denial about magic, even then. Merlin didn’t have the time or the resources to give us new weapons before we set to war, so we had to make do with what we had, much to the advantage of our enemy. Even though they were vulnerable in their small number, their weapons made them strong and they easily overpowered us. I had to watch my men drop like flies and their blood spill into the earth.
“It wasn’t long before I was targeted and as I lay defeated on the ground, I thought I would die without ever seeing you again. It was only thanks to Morgana that I am here today.”
Arthur pauses, before realising that his fists are now clenched beside him. He can’t get the image of a battlefield full of his dead men out of his mind, and he knows that he feels the greatest kind of guilt for surviving when they did not.
“I couldn’t believe it when I realised I was in Souhaiter,” he carries on. “I had been granted a second chance to see you! When I saw you standing in the galleries, you awakened a part of me that had been dormant since I left you. Part of me was worried that I would be unable to love you like before, because war had tarnished me and destroyed my soul. But just by seeing you, I knew that wasn’t true. I may not be the same person you once knew, but I still love you just the same.
“Of course, soon afterwards you inevitably found out the truth. I wish I could take away the pain you feel because of my actions, but I can’t. Yes, I knew that you finding out would only end in your pain, but I never believed the war would finish- that it would be an infinite kind of hell - and hence, I never thought you would remember. I guess having you remember is a relief and I hope that one day you won’t hate me for what I did.”
He exhales deeply. “So there it is,” he muses. “Everything I wanted to say to you. I’m not really sure if you’ve heard any of that or whether I’ve just been talking to the door, but I do want you to know that I am sorry for what I’ve done to you. I know I’m not deserving of it, but it’s your forgiveness that I desire more than anything, especially before I go.”
He imagines that he hears her heavy breathing coming from the other side of the door, but knows it’s only what he wants to hear.
Still sitting, he turns towards the door and places a hand over it, willing the door to open or for her to give him a sign that she’s listened to everything he has said.
But the silence continues. One beat. Two beats. Three beats. A hundred. No response.
Him talking to her doesn’t seem to have worked.
He closes his eyes in pain, unable to stave off the onslaught of tears.
I couldn’t get through to her, and it shocks him even though he feared her rejection. Instantly he realises that he will have to go back to Camelot and face his uncertain fate without ever finding absolution. If the further prospect of war doesn’t destroy him, then surely that will.
He stands up and looks forlornly at the door, trying to figure out what to say as his parting words.
“I’m sorry for coming here,” he finally whispers.
And then, with all the grace a broken-hearted man can muster, he leaves.
+
On the other side of the door, Gwen leans her head against the cool, wooden panel and allows the tears to run freely down her face. She’s an emotional wreck these days - she knows that much - and is still a confused, desolate, empty mess, uncertain of what she should be feeling and what she really feels; what is real to her and what isn’t; who she was and who she is now supposed to be.
She has heard everything that Arthur had to say and it’s affected her more than she thought it would. She’d been so consumed with his betrayal of her that she hadn’t stopped to consider all that he’d endured. Merlin hadn’t lied when he said he’s seen hell; it looks like Arthur had too, and her heart aches for the two of them.
But there’s an invisible force that holds her in place, stopping her from opening the door and letting him know she’s here. She’s nowhere near coming to terms with what he’s done; if she faces him now, she’s scared she’ll only be sick.
No, she’s physically unable to open that door and throw herself at him, and to let him know that she’d been inches away from him the entire time.
She can’t bring herself to face him. But she doesn’t want him to go.
+++
A/N: This is the penultimate chapter. A big thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read this, immersed themselves in this fic and always been thoughtful enough to leave a comment. It's been a challenge writing this fic and I wouldn't have got this far without you. ♥
Part Thirteen