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After Arthur banishes Merlin from Camelot, things proceed about the same. Morgana is still after the throne; Uther still executes sorcerers on sight while treating every other subject with scrupulous fairness; and Arthur and Guinevere continue to court. Arthur gets a new manservant and trains new knights and rarely allows himself to turn over Merlin’s last words to him in his mind:
I’ll serve you till the day I die.
The Eurasian eagle owl is easily recognizable by the tuffs on its head like cat’s ears. Its back is mottled with darker blackish coloring and the wings and tail are barred. The owl has a patch of colored feathers on its throat, and the orange eyes are distinctive.
Back before he had sent Merlin away, Arthur had very carefully not thought of all the things he would allow Merlin, if Merlin had just asked. Now he can’t get them out of his head. They mock him with how far he had let a traitor in. The parts of himself he had trusted to a man who had lied to him with every breath since the day they’d met.
When they had gone to find Morgause and she had shown him the vision of his mother, he should’ve known then. Not about the magic. About-
He’d known he was going to see his mother, speak to her. He hadn’t known what she was going to say, but he had known it would be the most significant moment of his life. He’d known that he was likely to weep and tremble, like a child who had been beaten.
He hadn’t asked Merlin to leave.
He hadn’t even considered it. It had been nothing for Merlin to see him striped down like that, as though it had been Merlin’s right. He had, without even considering it, believed that Merlin would never tell anyone of the prince’s weakness, his vulnerability, his uselessness and fear. Not his knights, not his father, not the servants or squires, not Guinevere. He had believed without question that Merlin had been nothing but on his side.
It gets worse, though. Arthur remembers how scared he had been to see his mother, how alone and worthless he’d felt in the moments before Morgause had cast the spell. How he had been afraid his mother would hate him. How he had been afraid he’d disappoint her.
He’d wanted Merlin there, because he was scared.
Arthur likes the castle at night. He always has. He knows it better than any of the nobles, better than many of the servants. It had been the perfect playground for a child who was sure he’d grow up to be a hero: mysteries and secret passages and locked rooms with jewels in them. He’d liked to pretend he was infiltrating an enemy fortress or rescuing a trapped princess. When Morgana had come along, she’d liked exploring the castle perhaps even more than he had, but they’d rarely done it together because she hadn’t been too keen on playing the role of either the villain or the princess.
Anyway, as a child Arthur had like the castle at night because he liked the rush he got when he scampered around in it in the dark, thereby proving he was brave, and as a man, Arthur still likes the castle at night because it’s so much closer to empty. He can go for whole corridors without seeing a soul.
He goes up to the North Tower, sometimes. They had been his mother’s chambers, and they haven’t been touched since his birth.
He sits out on the balcony, in the chair his mother would have sat in when she had been pregnant with him. He traces the arms carefully. The muted voices of the guards in the courtyard below mix with the noise of insects. The wind touches his scalp through his hair. It’s very dark.
“Morgana hates me,” he says quietly.
Arthur learns a lot of things as a prince. He learns the land like a language, how to coax open and read its secrets. He learns every weapon there is, from a sword to a smile, and he learns how to wield them. He learns history and battles and tactics, all the centuries of them. He learns how to take a life, and he learns how to spare one.
He learns how to make polite conversation with people who want to kill him, and how to cut off their simpering with a sharp word. He learns how to tell when people care only for his crown, though he doesn’t always apply that knowledge. He learns how not to ask for the things he wants: how to either take or to do without. He learns how to walk through the bones of the castle he owns like it’s his right, and he learns how to believe it.
Life is just beginning for him. It is opening up like a field in high summer, and there is nothing stopping him as far as the eye can see.
He would like to think that his one blessing was that at least Merlin hadn’t understood the meaning of the absurd trust Arthur had given him almost without conscious thought, but he knows better. Sorcerers ingratiate themselves; they manipulate, and Gods was Merlin a master.
Merlin had known, much, much better than Arthur had, and he’d used Arthur exactly the way everyone at court tried to, the way his father was constantly warning him against.
It’s horrifying to think about: how lonely he had been before he’d met Merlin, how desperate he had been to let Merlin in. He had allowed himself to care that he’d been lonely, as though it mattered, as though any of it mattered. He nauseates himself.
He would say he doesn’t miss Merlin, not even a little bit, but that would be a lie.
The Eurasian eagle owl has one of the largest home ranges for any bird. It is found in a number of habitats, but is mostly a bird of mountain regions, coniferous forests, steppes and other remote places. Although this species is largely absent in Britain and Ireland, it is thought that small numbers are returning.
He banished Merlin. Merlin is not still here. Merlin damn well better not still be here or Arthur will kill him himself. He knows Merlin can’t still be here, because Gaius looks so unutterably disappointed, and Merlin would never stay and not tell Gaius.
But sometimes, when he’s up on the North Tower, he thinks-
His father always tells him: Never start a sentence with if.
If he thinks he sees a shadow shift on the North Tower when he speaks aloud, alone, about his fear for the next battle with Morgana-
If he returns to the North Tower more and more often after that, just in case-
If he starts addressing his nonexistent listener like he’s explaining something simple to someone very slow-
Well, it doesn’t mean anything because Merlin lied to his face for four years straight and Arthur’s the prince so he doesn’t have friends anyway.
He finds a letter in his mother’s chambers. He’s sure it did not sit on the table yesterday, but it sits there now. It’s addressed to him.
He carries it around for two weeks before he reads it.
To my dearest Arthur,
I have only just met you, but I already love you with all my heart. I know that you will grow to be the best of both your father and of I, and far wiser and gentler than either of us.
To think of all the years I should have with you! To see you come to love this land as I do, and to watch your heart grow from a boy’s to a man’s, and no less the pure for it.
My truest wish for you, Arthur, is that you never have to be alone. I will have betrayed you in the worst way before you are even a day old; and though I can never be with you as you deserve, I pray that it is easy for you to find those who can. Your father will be alone very soon – but not ever, not truly, for he will have you.
And at this date my letter is written, but two and a half hours afore my death, written by my own hand, and so subscribed with my heart’s own blood, you are, without doubt, the best thing that did ever befall me.
All my love, my darling, for all my life and all the years long after,
Ygraine Pendragon, Queen of Camelot, Duchess of Cornwall
He thinks about it at odd moments when he should be doing other things.
How did that letter get on the table?
Two months after Arthur becomes king, he overturns his father’s ban on magic.
Merlin doesn’t return.
He never tells Guinevere what happened, just that Merlin had stolen something from him and so he had sent him away.
“Do you miss him?” Guinevere asks. She’s trying to learn embroidery to look more like a lady of the court. It’s clear she hates it, but she doesn’t quit, either.
Arthur’s hands hurt. It takes him a moment to realize he’s clenching them so hard they’ve cramped.
“Does it matter?”
“Well,” says Guinevere, plucking at a thread, “seems like it might be important.”
Arthur shakes his head. “He left me. It’s a moot point. He lied to me, which is pretty final, and then he left me, which is- very final.”
“I thought you banished him, not the other way around.”
Arthur shifts some papers on his desk.
“Yeah.”
Arthur begins to advertise for a Court Sorcerer; in legalizing magic again while knowing nothing about its workings or uses, he really does need someone to advise him.
He and Guinevere and Gaius interview the candidates. Arthur scrutinizes them closely, but none of them are Merlin. He supposes he needn’t have bothered; Gaius doesn’t check, and if anyone knows what Merlin might be doing and whether he might ever return, it’s Gaius.
It’s better this way, though. Merlin’s a liar. Arthur doesn’t need him.
There is a line from the speech he gave to welcome men of common birth into the knights that Guinevere had kissed him over.
“The fantastic thing about class is that it is about nothing – absolutely nothing. The imaginary lines between us need only be unimagined.”
How mad those lines had seemed to Merlin, and would have to me if I had had less pride.
“I miss fighting in tournaments, you know. Nowadays, the only fighting I do is when someone is legitimately trying to kill me.”
The wind on the North Tower is stronger than it is lower down and it feels good through his shirt and against his scalp. The night is purple, and the lights and fires in the town below look like sparks of gold in a rock.
“Which happens surprisingly often,” he adds to the silence.
Arthur is an extremely tactile person. He does not express it, does not get to express it. He claps his knights on the back only very occasionally, and only after something truly stupendous. He keeps careful track of it, and does not touch one of them any more than the others.
In his secret-most heart, unacknowledged even to himself, he thinks he is not very good at touching Guinevere. It’s difficult to know what’s too familiar and what’s too stiff in the moment, though he has read the book his father had given him for his thirteenth birthday cover to cover several times trying to pin it down. The book is called How to be a Prince and a Gentlemen. It has been a very useful book.
His father had loved him, but he had very rarely touched him. Arthur had lived for when he did.
On the North Tower, he tells the darkness everything.
“I worry, sometimes, that Morgana is safe. I want her to be safe. And I know … I know I shouldn’t, because my first duty is to my people, and I cannot want her to be safe and serve them at the same time.”
Morgana wouldn’t want his forgiveness either, Arthur knows. How often she had tried to be his sister, and how rarely he had let her. How lonely she must have been when she’d come here, and how jealous he’d been of Uther’s easy affection for her.
When he gets back to his own chambers, he kisses his greyhound on the head. He had never been too proud to kiss his dogs.
Three years after Merlin leaves, Arthur catches his wife and his First Knight kissing in her chambers.
There is a moment of utter, utter shock, of incomprehension, when Guinevere and Lancelot seem to think that if they don’t move, perhaps Arthur will not be able to see them. Then Arthur turns stiffly and walks right back out the door. As it slams, Guinevere sobs.
Later, there is shouting and banishment, as there had been with Merlin. Arthur strips Lancelot of his knighthood and sends him away in disgrace. He is so angry with Guinevere he can barely speak to her at all.
He always had told Merlin: if you don’t knock, you don’t know what you might walk in on.
Things are different after Guinevere goes. He feels old and worn thin; it’s hard to believe he’s not yet thirty.
It takes six months, but Arthur knows that Guinevere had never meant to hurt him. He is sure of this, at least. She may not love him – or perhaps she even still does – but she has never once been malicious.
If even someone as noble as Guinevere can betray him – well. It changes things. Betrayal will happen again, he knows, but the knowledge doesn’t cut in the same way. People are by nature weak – God knows he is.
There’s Morgana, who he had betrayed first by never being willing to waver from his father’s laws long enough for her to trust him. There’s Guinevere, who he had simply expected to love him more than Lancelot because he was the king. And then there’s Merlin, who he had dismissed and disrespected, and who he had been too proud and too frightened to understand how much he cared for. The three friends of his childhood, and he had lost them all in his own arrogance. He had lost them all to his crown.
Merlin had always told him he was a prat.
The Eurasian eagle owl mates for life.
At night, the mated pairs of the Eurasian eagle owl hoot back and forth to each other from separate trees. They make conversation.
If a mate dies, the owl will not take another. They will go quiet. Sometimes, at night, they will hoot once or twice, just to see, but no one answers them.
When he discovers Agravaine’s betrayal, it’s a different sort of wound than the previous ones: a deep bruise rather than a lancing pain. It’s happened so many times before. People are not loyal to him. He knows this, now.
“He lied to me. And not- not a little lie; he told me a lie that contained multitudes.” Arthur hears his voice raise without his consent. “He treated me like I was furniture. Not- not a friend. Like I had no right to make a choice.”
Arthur closes his eyes. He swallows around a lump in his throat.
“It’s not a great quality in a King, is it?” he says. “To this naturally inspire people to turn on you?”
The shadows might stir, but nothing leaves them.
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I thought.”
He knows he can bring Merlin back, but he doesn’t try. He doesn’t think about that too much. It’s pride, he tells himself; Merlin will come back on his own. Merlin will serve him until the day he dies.
Really, he knows, it’s that he’s afraid Merlin won’t come back, not even if he begs.
It’s only after Guinevere had left that he’s able to think clearly about Merlin. He’d been angry as he has only been a few times in his life – when Morgause’s vision of his mother had told him of his father’s actions surrounding her death; when he’d caught his wife in the arms of another man – but it had never once occurred to him to turn Merlin over to his father, to do anything, in fact, but help him escape Camelot and then forcibly never think of him again. To turn against Merlin, even when Merlin had turned against him, had been impossible.
He remembers shoving enough gold at Merlin to buy half a town without a second thought and flushes.
He knows now. He knows.
How long have you been training to be a prat, my lord?
He used to feel so high and mighty, strutting around this castle with Merlin following at his heels, panting for scraps of his approval. Merlin had been as adoring and unconditional as his greyhound is.
Now he knows how foolish that was. If anyone had truly been pulled around like a hound on a string, it had been him. His own trust in Merlin had been the bit that was unconditional. He had only existed when Merlin was looking at him.
He remembers the quest he undertook with Merlin to find the Dragon Lord. It stings to think on it now; he hadn’t acted like that since he’d been a first-year squire trying to gain the respect of his father’s favorite knights. He’d spent that whole trip all but begging Merlin to let him in, teasing him and throwing pillows at him and poking at him with a stick, because he hadn’t known how to say it any other way.
There are loads of servants who can serve. So few are capable of making a complete prat of themselves, and the half-lidded look he’d given Merlin after: Will you play with me, will you play with me?
At the time, he couldn’t even see it, but Gods he’d been so eager. Tongue lolling out, panting, he’d never wanted to please anyone the way he did Merlin.
When Merlin had still lived with Arthur, there had been a mated pair of eagle owls near the castle. If you listened, at night you could hear them flirting with each other from their separate trees.
When Merlin had still lived with Arthur. That’s wrong, though, Arthur knows. He had never lived with Arthur. He had lived with Gaius.
Now, though, if you listen at night, you can’t hear any owls. One owl lives near Camelot still; Arthur can see her from time to time out his window.
Her mate is dead. She doesn’t speak often.
When Mordred stabs him, Arthur knows he is going to die. He has seen wounds before, and this one is deep and thick and the blood won’t stop coming. He already feels strangely weak and disconnected from his body. No one is coming to rescue him with gold eyes and bad excuses. He had always known Merlin would outlive him.
None of his knights are near to him on the battlefield, which isn’t good, because Arthur has precious few minutes left to put the affairs of his kingdom in order. He lays on the cold ground and retches up bile that sticks to his cheek. He thinks of Camelot, of the beauty of a land he’ll never see again now that he will be gone from her. He thinks of the new king she will have, and how he can only believe that this man will love her as fiercely and as tenderly as he has done.
In the moment between his close and this new king’s beginning, there’s a flash of brilliantly white light like the whole sky is covered in heat lightening, and then there are hands under his armpits. A warm body under his head. Fingers pressing against his neck as a man holds him.
“Merlin-”
He had come back. He would always come. He would never leave Arthur, not truly.
There is a small incident several months before Arthur sends Merlin away. Arthur has been rather down in the mouth since having seen Morgause’s vision of his mother, and now there is a feast for Arthur’s birthday. Arthur has been saying how stupid it is for days and generally being prickly and sulky.
“Well, you’ll have to go, because it’s your birthday,” Merlin tells him reasonably.
“Thanks for that, Merlin. You know, you ought to be more sympathetic. If I weren’t going to the feast, you wouldn’t have to serve.”
Merlin simply grins at him.
When Arthur enters the great hall that evening, Merlin, standing behind Arthur’s chair, is wearing the official serving robes of Camelot, complete with the outrageous feathered hat, and a rather rueful smirk.
Arthur stares for a full ten seconds before he bursts out laughing loud enough to shock the court. Gods, Merlin was stupid, he was so stupid, he was insane-
“Wine?” Merlin asks, completely deadpan.
“Arthur, don’t you dare, don’t you dare, you stupid prat, you stupid, stupid-”
The man’s voice breaks, and Arthur twists his head with great effort to see his face.
Merlin hasn’t aged a day. He looks exactly like the boy who had served Arthur in the castle, who’d died for him and played with him and betrayed him and bickered with him and distrusted him and teased him and lied to him and treated him like a human being. He’s crying, great fat ugly tears that turn his face red and squished-looking. Merlin presses his fingers against Arthur’s wound and then jerks them back a second with a soft, shocked noise before pressing in again.
Arthur lifts his gloved hand behind his head to graze against Merlin’s cheek.
“Darling,” he murmurs, and then he says it again and again, as though he cannot stop. “Darling, darling, darling.”
“You don’t have to start being nice to me; you’re not going anywhere, Arthur,” Merlin tells him, eyes fixed on the wound so as not to look at Arthur’s face. “You’re going to live.”
Arthur smiles; it’s too fond. Merlin is the only thing he can see.
“No man,” he says, “is worth your tears.”
Merlin makes a horrible keening sound and his little feet beat helplessly on the ground.
“You’re certainly not,” Merlin chokes out, “because you’re not going to die.” And then he puts Arthur’s hand on his own chest, above his heart, and the sky blows white again.
From his sickbed, writing the letter is laborious. The wound on his stomach pulls irritably with every adjustment of the paper, and it only makes him more aware of how the bandage itches.
He’s not dying. That’s not why he’s doing this.
The eyes of his greyhound in front of the fire catch the light and glow amber. Arthur watches her, and she watches him back. Imperceptibly slow, Arthur’s own eyes start to sting.
Outside, the eagle owl hoots.
He touches his side with careful fingertips. It can’t hurt this much for the rest of his life. Some things have to get better.
To my dear Guinevere and Lancelot, most compassionate of Queens and most noble of Knights, I offer greetings.
I trust you will have heard of the battle, and of my wounds. Rumors have been known to exaggerate, so allow me to put your minds at rest: I am believed to make a recovery. Guinevere, you should be able to attest that this is my own hand, and that I have not dictated this letter, so you can see how well I am doing already.
As to my true reason for writing, I hope you both will consider my formal request to return to court indefinitely. You will have my permission and further my blessing to continue your relationship here, and rest assured that Guinevere will not be called on to act as my wife in public.
It has been several years since I have seen you both, and though we did not part on the best terms, I have remained
Your king, your servant, your friend,
Arthur Pendragon of Camelot
If he had thought that now – finally, finally, after he had bled out in Merlin’s arms and Merlin had cried and screamed and performed a miracle – that Merlin would return, he is to be mistaken.
He doesn’t think Merlin is angry at him anymore, if he ever was. God knows Arthur has stopped being angry with Merlin’s lies and betrayal long ago, and he had always been much better at holding a grudge than Merlin.
He wishes Merlin were still angry with him. The alternative is much worse. Merlin simply doesn’t care to know him anymore.
When Guinevere and Lancelot return, looking both lovely and nervous, Arthur feels nothing more than he does when he welcomes any other guest to court. In the end, Guinevere had been simply another of his failures, another way he is nothing but the crown. Arthur thinks of the promises he and Guinevere made in front of God and witnesses, but, he thinks, there truly exist those things which dissolve them.
What is a shock, though, is that they bring a baby, and that Guinevere is pregnant with their second. As always, Arthur had forgotten that people exist when he isn’t looking at them.
On the steps of the castle, Lancelot clasps his hand, gauging his reaction warily, and Guinevere looks like she wants to hug him but isn’t sure it’s appropriate. It really isn’t. It makes him feel terribly lonely.
“Do you really look like that?” Arthur asks. He forces himself not to touch his own hair, in which he had found several greys already. He’d scowled and plucked them out and known that if Merlin had still been his manservant, he would’ve been teased mercilessly at unexpected moments for months. Apparently there are some things better about living alone.
“I mean,” he continues, “you can’t really still be that young.”
He doesn’t say it, but he wishes he could’ve seen what Merlin truly looks like.
The scar on his side aches some days, but he ignores it. It’s not like he hasn’t had plenty of practice.
He wonders if someday in the future, he will get another chance. He wonders, if given it, if he could change anything. If the long list of things he’s ruined is merely inevitable.
Nights expand like over-stretched elastic. The silence is always different: sometimes it is as thin as a membrane, tonight it is as thick as a velvet cloak.
“Sir Leon brought Morgana’s body back,” Arthur says. He leans his forearms against the cold stone of the ramparts. It had, in fact, been nearly three weeks since Leon had brought Morgana’s body back from a where it had been placed, just off-sight of the battlefield where Mordred had nearly killed Arthur, but Arthur hasn’t wanted to touch any part of that subject.
“I know you hadn’t anything to do with that,” he adds. His hand shakes, and he clenches it into a fist. “I know you wouldn’t make decisions for me.”
Arthur almost believes he hears a noise to his right, stifled, and almost exactly the noise he wants to let escape himself: a bitter, strangled sob.
Like most owl species, the Eurasian eagle owl is largely nocturnal, with its activity focused in the first few hours after sunset and the last few hours before sunrise.
When Galahad is born, there is something wrong with him. His breaths are few and raspy, and Gaius says he will not live through the night. The witch Arthur had finally hired as his court sorcerer stays with Guinevere and Galahad for hours, but it appears to be beyond her powers to fix. When Arthur comes to speak with them about seeking more help, he ends up leading Elaine away by the hand when he finds Lancelot curled up on the floor crying outside Guinevere’s chambers.
For lack of anything better to do with her, he deposits Elaine in Leon’s charge and goes up to the North Tower.
He had been born and his mother had died in this room. She had not lived through the night. The seasons may turn and the faces may differ, but nothing ever truly changes. Arthur takes a breath.
“Merlin,” he says, “I know you’re here, because you’d never make me be alone. I need your help. Please-” his voice cracks, “please come home. I can’t do this without you.” The last is barely more than breath.
A soft breeze plays through the trees. The lonely owl hoots. But Merlin doesn’t answer.
Arthur is stomping back down the stairs, wiping furiously at his eyes and thinking, Well now I know: he won’t come back even if I beg, when his Court Sorcerer comes running up, her eyes alight.
“Sire, you’d best come quickly-”
Arthur runs.
“I sent word to everyone I could think of,” she pants as they approach Guinevere’s chambers, “and someone answered-”
Arthur shoves open the door.
The man leaning over Galahad is so ancient as to be laughable, easily twice as old as Gaius. His white beard is tucked into his belt, and his robes are at least a century out of date.
“Excellent,” the wizard says in a horrible croak. “It may be curable, but I’ll need the King to run a few errands for me. Can’t myself, much too old.”
He fixes a wizened stare on Arthur, daring him to speak.
You can’t really still be that young.
Arthur laughs so hard he cries.
They have a marvelous time; it’s hard to remember a baby’s life is hanging in the balance when Arthur is carrying Dragoon around piggyback through half the tunnels under the castle, bickering and laughing and tripping over each other and never once does Dragoon drop the outrageous voice. Arthur hasn’t had this much fun since- well, since he sent Merlin away. He can’t stop smiling, and he knows it must show on his face: he’s besotted, ridiculous, and he can’t bring himself to care. It’s not like Merlin hasn’t seen him do some truly stupid shit, after all. He’s the twenty year-old Prince of Camelot again, invincible, not a man nearing middle-age who has been stabbed in the back and in the stomach by everyone he’s ever trusted, who has pushed away anyone he’s ever loved, and who has lived with the weight of a kingdom on his brow for nearly a decade.
Laughing and panting, they’re leaning up against each other and the stone wall, and Arthur’s gasping, “This is the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever done – and there have been some contenders,” and then he’s wondering idly whether it’s wrong to get hard from thinking about kissing a man old enough to be his grandfather. Gods, he doesn’t care; he wants Merlin however he can have him-
Dragoon straightens up and puts cold air between them. “Best get this to that Court Physician of yours before the baby snuffs it,” he says croakily.
Merlin still does not come home.
Oh, he’s here alright, in the castle; if there was a doubt about that before, there’s no doubt in Arthur’s mind now. But he doesn’t come back to Arthur. He doesn’t let Arthur see him when he goes to the North Tower to pour his heart out into thin air: not as Dragoon and not as a boy and certainly not as he must really look.
But that’s not fair, because things are different. Merlin still lurks in the shadows, invisible, but he speaks back when Arthur tells him things. He tells him little goings on in the castle that Arthur never sees: the assistant Cook’s son is sleeping with Lady Caradoc; describes in such loving detail how the roast Arthur ate for dinner that night had actually been dropped on the floor three separate times before it made it to the table that Arthur lies flat out on the floor of the tower and laughs hysterically.
“Just how long have you been here?”
“Since the start. You didn’t think I’d ever really leave you.”
He can tell Merlin’s grinning. He never did have any respect.
The nights Arthur likes best, Merlin will tell him about the things he’s seen: Old Gods and the power and beauty of the magic of the land. The things he’s learned. The things he’d like to see. How he’d like to travel to the warm waters across the channel, south into the Mediterranean and the rest of Europe “because the magical creatures there, absolutely incredible; you think we’ve got some impressive ones here, but I’m telling you-”
Arthur almost asks him why he doesn’t travel, if it’s what he wants, but he holds his tongue. After all, he knows the answer.
Merlin still won’t let Arthur see him. Arthur is too proud to beg, and not religious enough to pray, but he wants to. Gods, how he wants to.
“It’s cold,” Arthur complains one night. It’s not that cold, but he’s hoping that Merlin will agree to come inside with him, to his chambers, even if he won’t step out of the shadows. Just the thought of Merlin there, after all these years, shocks Arthur hot.
There’s a silence, and then-
A fire springs up in front of Arthur. It needs no wood, and it does not scorch the stones around it.
“That’s a pretty neat trick,” Arthur says after a stunned minute.
In of the heart of the fire, a replica of the castle emerges. It’s perfect in every detail. Servants are hurrying through the courtyard. Knights are training in the field. There’s a tiny Guinevere leaning out a window.
“You can touch it,” Merlin says.
In the fire, Arthur can see himself, standing on the steps. He recognizes himself because he’s wearing a crown. There’s another man, just behind him and to his right. It’s this man that Arthur goes to touch.
It burns his fingers.
“Ouch!” he exclaims, pushing them into his mouth. He glares at the castle.
“Oh, damn,” sighs Merlin. “Okay, you can touch it now.”
It isn’t until Arthur is on the cusp of sleep that it occurs to him that when he’d said he was cold, Merlin might have thought he was about to call it a night, and that maybe Merlin hadn’t wanted him to go.
After that, Merlin shows him magic. It all pours out at once, like he’s been waiting for a very long time. All of it is incredible, but when Merlin conjures a familiar little ball of light, Arthur has to get away from Merlin and brace his hands on the ramparts and breathe very carefully through his nose to be sure he won’t do something he’ll regret.
Gods, he had been so sure he wasn’t angry anymore.
But this emotion, it’s not anger.
The territorial song of the eagle owl, which can be heard at great distance, is a deep resonant ooh-hu with emphasis on the first syllable. It is not uncommon for a pair to perform an antiphonal duet.
When Arthur is forty, Gaius dies. The night of the funeral, Arthur goes up to the North Tower directly after his last council meeting. It’s bitterly cold, and he is not sure Merlin will be here tonight – he’s not here every night, after all – but he has to check.
There is no sound and the rooms are empty, but Arthur has long ago learned that does not mean he is alone. He sits with his back to the wall and speaks of nothing until his voice grows hoarse and peters out.
The wind flaps around him. He’s glad he brought a blanket. He closes his eyes.
“I don’t want you to feel you have to be alone,” he says. His voice sounds like he’s been strangled.
Something bumps into his side, and then presses. When Arthur opens his eyes again, the boy Merlin had been is sitting next to him, staring determinedly straight ahead, out into the sky.
It’s hard to believe they were ever that young. There are no lines on Merlin’s face, neither from frowns nor smiles. The world has not yet shaped him or used him as a canvas. Arthur had forgotten, actually, how pointy his chin is. He smiles to see it.
In the black window of the castle, Arthur catches sight of Merlin’s reflection. The panes of glass capture him in ghostly doubled lines – the hard line of his cheek, the holes of his eyes, the deep red shadow of his mouth. Arthur can't look away from the image.
The lines between their shirts blur.
On instinct, Arthur scrubs his knuckles through Merlin’s hair. It pays off; Merlin gives a watery, amused sound, and when Arthur’s hand settles on his shoulder and squeezes, neither of them move away.
“Are you going grey?” Merlin demands gleefully. “You are! Gods, you’re ancient.”
“We can’t all be eighteen still, Merlin.”
Once, Arthur tries to ask.
“You never came back,” he says to the darkness. “I thought- I thought after I overturned the magic laws you’d know you- And then after- I was stabbed-” He clears his throat. “But you didn’t.”
Merlin doesn’t answer. For once, Arthur thinks he’s just not there.
His grip on Merlin’s arm doesn’t let up as he yanks him into his own chambers and pushes a leather satchel at him before sweeping the remains of the lunch Merlin had served him into a cloth.
“I can buy you twenty-four hours, but that’s all, so don’t take the main paths in the woods. I don’t know if my father will send someone out after you- here, put these in the bag – don’t go to Ealdor; if he sends soldiers out after you, they’ll check there.” Arthur yanks the drawer where he keeps his gold that’s not in the treasury all the way out of his desk and dumps the entire thing into the satchel still clutched in Merlin’s hands. Coins bounce out and clatter on the floor. “Here, take this too-”
He thrusts his sword at Merlin before he realizes Merlin hasn’t moved.
“I’m sorry,” Merlin says. His voice breaks with tears. “I should’ve-”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Arthur snaps. He doesn’t look at Merlin. There’s something like fury roiling just underneath his skin. He’s nearly shaking with it.
“Arthur, you know me, I know you do; you know I-”
Arthur cuts over him without remorse. Sorcerer, liar, traitor. “I don’t know you, and I don’t want to. I’m giving you a way out of Camelot, free. But if I never,” and now Arthur really is shaking, “see you again, it will be too soon. Do I make myself clear?”
There’s a strange, still moment. Half of Merlin’s face hides in darkness and half is lit purely, forming a sharp line down his center. History, destiny rattles over the tracks.
“I won’t leave you,” Merlin tells him. He sniffles. “Not ever. I’ll serve you till the day I die.”
The days spin into seasons and the constellations wheel overhead and nothing changes. It has been twenty-two years since he last saw Merlin’s face.
Arthur has wanted to be a father as he has wanted few things. He never will be: after he and Guinevere had tried and tried, Gaius had explained to him what being born of magic really meant. He had loved his family with a passion matched only by his love of Camelot, and in the end he is left with none of them and no possibility to gain another.
He is very lucky. He is the godfather of Guinevere and Lancelot’s two beautiful, brave children, and he has already named Elaine as his heir.
“She’s so much like Morgana,” he tells Merlin one night. “So much, you have no idea. The way she really was. Before.” He passes his hand over his eyes. His voice shakes. “I can’t think, sometimes, how terribly she must have suffered.”
Merlin doesn’t answer. Arthur wishes, more fiercely than ever before, that he could see him.
“You would love Elaine.”
“I do,” Merlin says.
It’s like a bucket of ice over Arthur’s head. But of course, he thinks, he wouldn’t be only person in Camelot Merlin wants to see.
“Can you see yourself?”
He hears Merlin swallow.
“Always.”
For the eagle owl, the primary function for vocalization is for the purpose of courtship. Though a pair is monogamous, they engage in courtship rituals annually. Courtship in the Eurasian eagle owl may involve bouts of duetting, feather-ruffling, mutual bowing, nipping, fondling, and mock-fighting.
“I tripped you up with magic when we met.”
There’s a silence.
“You shit, you shit- I should’ve known- Do you know how much of an idiot I looked for that? Gods, it looked like I was drunk; Kay wouldn’t let up for weeks- You- you-”
Even now, he can imagine the impish grin on Merlin’s face, and he wants to kiss it off of his stupid, insolent mouth.
As autumn changes to winter, Camelot turns a dull, ragged brown. Arthur wonders how his father did this, alone, and for so many winters.
Uther’s loneliness and loss had hardened into hatred. It’s a difficult, painful admission for Arthur, and one that he knows has been too slow in coming. He had never once considered the same coldness would happen to him. But it would have already, he knows, without Merlin.
Arthur is flushed with victory. The day had occasioned the first tournament in which he has fought in years, though his fight had merely been an exhibition. He remembers glancing to the sidelines too often – he hadn’t realized just how often he had used to look for Merlin here, to check that Merlin had still been watching him.
“Were you lazing about up here all day or did you come down to watch?” Arthur demands to the empty tower.
“Absolutely,” Merlin’s voice answers him.
Arthur kicks off his boots with twin thuds. “Absolutely which, Merlin? Honestly, how do you even get up in the morning?”
“Absolutely of course I came. Of course.”
Arthur settles back in the chair and flexes his calves, watching his feet idly as he points his toes and lets them relax again. “Gaheris is looking better on his backswing, but I’ll still have Elyan work with him. Lancelot’s too soft on them-” Merlin snorts but Arthur ignores him as he continues.
The tournament had been held in honor of a snotty new baron’s visit. Arthur had disliked him immediately, but he is quite wealthy and pays his taxes on time, so Arthur can hardly complain. Nevertheless, something about Sir Luter had put his hackles up, had made him think of the slyness and treachery of Agravaine. It’s unfair, though, to take out past betrayals on new allies: that is not the sort of king Arthur strives to be for Camelot. It is fair, however, to fight an exhibition in his own tournament, to remind Luter that not all Camelot’s skill and renown on the battlefield comes from her most famous knights, that her King is a force of his own, personally.
“-sent Percival out next after- You weren’t there, were you?”
“What, of course I-” Just because Arthur cannot see Merlin’s face doesn’t mean Merlin is unable to see Arthur’s. The look on it causes him to stutter into silence and then say, “Ah, nope.”
“Ah, nope,” Arthur parrots. “You really are useless. So come on, then, tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“What were you up to all day if not watching your King? Surely it must have been something tremendously important.”
“Just, um. Well, you see-”
Arthur rolls his eyes, but the high of the tournament seems to have disappeared in a curious rush. He thinks of the feast that will start in mere moments, and how he will have to joke and speak companionably with a man he does not trust. Merlin had used to serve him at those feasts. Merlin had used to check all his armor fussily between bouts in a tournament. He stands suddenly.
“I’d better get to the banquet. Not all of us can sit up here all day.”
“Arthur-” Merlin starts, huffy, but Arthur snaps over him before he can finish.
“Going to lie to me, Merlin?”
It’s suddenly very cold on the North Tower. The banners of Camelot flap on the turrets. Neither of them speak, certainly not Merlin.
After everything, after all this time, Merlin still lies to him without thought. Arthur tells him everything, every ugly, scaly, shriveled and desperate part of himself, and Merlin gives nothing of his heart in return. In all these years, that hasn’t changed. Merlin had made him a King and then left him alone with it.
“You told me you’d never leave me,” Arthur says. “But I don’t see anyone here, do you?”
Arthur had learned a lot of things as the prince. It isn’t until he’s the King that he learns the rest.
As the King, he learns that he is the crown; he’s not a person, not really. He is a tool to serve the land and her people. His life is not his own; he is merely an extension of his people, to be used solely for their betterment.
As the prince, he had learned that no one would ever pick him over the Crown. As the King, he learns that they shouldn’t.
“I shouldn’t have married Guinevere.”
Merlin makes a scoffing noise. “I know she hurt you, but she was an amazing queen. Perfect for it.”
“She still is the Queen, you know,” Arthur reminds him. He’s smiling. “It’s not that I’m sorry I married her, because she is an excellent queen. But I married her because I loved her. Or- well.” He smiles.
“You loved her,” says Merlin softly.
Arthur thinks about it. It was thirty years ago now; it’s hard to remember.
“I can’t say I ever really knew her well enough. I do now, maybe, that she’s back, but then?”
Merlin clears his throat. “Just because you don’t know every little thing about a person doesn’t mean you can’t love them.”
Arthur doesn’t answer. He watches the lights go on and off in the lower town like fireflies. He is responsible for the life behind each and every one of those flickers, because he is the King, and that’s what that means.
When the wind changes, he speaks again.
“I thought I was so noble to want to marry for love.” He laughs, but there’s no bitterness in it. “But really, what I meant was that I thought my personal feelings and the personal feelings of one other person were more important than any gains I could make for Camelot by a politically advantageous marriage.” He sighs. “I know you never liked my father, and … it’s not like it’s hard to understand why, but sometimes I think how much more ready for a kingship he was than I, how much stronger. How much more he realized he would have to do without.”
“You haven’t done so badly yourself.” Merlin’s voice is teasing. “Uniting all of Albion. Returning magic to the land. Ruling in peace for twenty years. You know. All in a day’s work.”
Arthur rolls his eyes. “I believe I might have had some help with that.”
Merlin is devastatingly sure when he tells Arthur: “You could’ve done it alone.”
“But I didn’t have to.”
Arthur thinks about how much he would like to bump his shoulder against Merlin’s, ruffle his hair. All the excuses he used to have to touch him.
His throat aches.
Sometimes he thinks: Merlin must feel the same. He’d stayed and he’d stayed and he’d never left. Even when Arthur had tried to make him, he hadn’t left. The way his voice goes sometimes, when he talks to Arthur, is unbelievably intimate.
But then he remembers: Merlin must know how he feels. After all, he’d called Merlin darling as he’d bled out in Merlin’s arms; it hadn’t been exactly subtle.
That had been over twenty-five years ago. If Merlin feels the same, all he would’ve had to do once in the last twenty-five years is show his face.
“I hear you’re abdicating.”
Arthur swallows. “Not for a year. So don’t think of buggering off until then.”
“Elaine still seems very young. Are you-”
“She’s thirty-two, Merlin. And I’m already a year older than my father was when he died.”
Merlin doesn’t say anything for a long while, and then:
“There was a time I thought you wouldn’t live passed twenty-eight.” His voice is hoarse.
Arthur clears his throat. “Me too.”
“But after all,” Merlin continues with forced cheerfulness, “you are practically decrepit. It’s a miracle you can walk from your bedroom to the throne room without having servants carry you-”
Arthur makes an outraged sound. “I’ll have you know I could still take you apart!”
“With one blow?” Merlin’s voice is so affectionate.
Arthur smiles. Maybe it’s a good thing he can’t see Merlin, because if he could, he knows he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from kissing him. After all this time, he wouldn’t even try.
“Something like that.”
He’s lying on the stones with his head pillowed on his arms on the balcony of the North Tower. It’s so late as to be early, and there’s an empty jug of wine rolling around somewhere. He’s pretty sure Merlin has been stealing sips out of it when he hadn’t been looking, because there’s no way he drank it that fast on his own. Also the creatures dancing around in the magical fire by Arthur’s hip have been getting steadily more lopsided for the past two hours.
The thought that he might’ve put his mouth on the jug where Merlin had makes him smile.
“Best tournament,” Merlin says.
“Obviously the ones where I snogged Guinevere,” Arthur answers lazily and Merlin snorts. “Best feast.”
“The one for Yule about eight … no eleven? years ago. With the pigs.”
“You were there?” Arthur rolls over on his side to face where Merlin’s voice comes from. “You little shit! You probably let the pigs loose.”
There’s a silence.
“Gods!” Arthur shouts with laughter. “You are the worst manservant I’ve ever had.”
“You looked bored,” Merlin tells him unrepentantly. “And that sorcerer you had to entertain was really awful.”
“And you thought pigs were better.”
Merlin doesn’t dignify that with an answer. “Best magical disaster.”
“That’s a broad category for us.” Arthur gives a mock sigh. “You know, I’m gonna have to go with a troll marrying my father.”
Merlin pauses. “Do you think they ever…”
Arthur makes a repulsed face. “Good God, Merlin, does your depravity know no bounds?”
Merlin snorts again. “Remember when you tried to make me leave Camelot when your father ordered my arrest for stealing her seal?”
Arthur grins. “You didn’t go then either. Really bad at taking orders.”
The wind plays over the hair on his forehead. A dragon bursts out of the fire and swirls up into the night.
“You never learn, do you?” Merlin teases. “Best quest.”
“Ealdor,” Arthur answers without thought. “Best embarrassing moment.”
“When you thought you caught me trying on Morgana’s dress.”
“I did catch you trying on Morgana’s dress. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Merlin. Best year…”
The year passes quickly: they all do once they’re over.
“You know you must come back,” Elaine says urgently. “All the time. Mother and Dad will be awful reminiscing about the good old days without you. She still swears he killed a Griffin.” Her expression lets him know exactly what she thinks of that.
“Is than an order, Your Highness?” Arthur teases, and smirks at the face Elaine pulls.
His steps are heavy up to the top of the North Tower. He thought they would be lighter without the crown, but maybe it was never the crown at all. Maybe it’s just him. He’s an old man now, after all.
He stands on the balcony of his mother’s chambers and looks out over the land. Somehow, even after everything, he thinks he never fully appreciated quite how beautiful it is. But that’s how he has always been: never noticing things until he leaves them behind.
He doesn’t have a crown anymore. He has never done without it his whole life.
There is a touch to his shoulder. Arthur turns slightly but sees no one. He leans into it just a little; it’s not like Merlin will let him fall.
“Do you eat bricks? I told you not having me as a manservant to forget to bring you meals was a bad idea.”
Arthur grins and leans harder. It’s true; he is fat around the middle these days. He stopped minding a while ago: it means he survived a war and lived to grow old in peace.
“I told Guinevere once I’d like to leave it all behind and become a farmer. I told her I’d take you with me, obviously.”
“To do all the manual labor, great.”
“Well, I’m certainly not going to do it, Merlin.”
“So that’s what you’re going to be doing. Becoming a farmer.”
“Are you going to come with me?”
“Are you asking?”
Arthur swallows. “Yes.”
Merlin hesitates. “Even if you still can’t see me?”
Arthur swallows again. This time is much harder; it never used to be like that. Used to be, asking for things was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do.
He had expected Merlin would say this. But it still stings.
“Yes,” he says.
“Oh, Arthur,” Merlin says. “Did you even have to ask? Don’t you know, by now, that I would do anything in the world for you?”
Not anything, Arthur knows.
The oldest Eurasian eagle owl known to have lived in the wild died at twenty-seven years and nine months. Like many other bird species, they can live much longer without having to endure difficult natural conditions, and have survived up to sixty-eight years when well cared for.
They move out by a lake. Arthur is sure he has never been here before, and yet-
“Do I know this place?”
The grin in Merlin’s voice is so loud that if Arthur could see it, he knows it would blot out the sun.
“Not this time.”
There is already a cottage there, somehow, but it was built for only one person. That’s fine; they had lived in each other’s pockets at one time anyway.
They do plant a garden – or, well, Arthur lounges around in the sun while Merlin magicks a garden, and occasionally throws dirt clumps at where he thinks Merlin’s head might be, all of which seem to zoom back into his face with startling accuracy – and Arthur goes hunting when they need it. He potters around the cottage and learns how to cook in his free time. Dragoon teaches a group of extremely young and bouncy witches and wizards. His stupid voice and his crotchety manner make Arthur smirk, so he generally sits under the oak tree and watches them. It’s good to be able to see Merlin, even like this.
“After all,” he tells Merlin, “you probably really do look that old now-” and is promptly given donkey ears for his trouble.
As the cottage was built for one, there is only room for one bed. Arthur thinks Merlin could probably fix this problem with magic, but neither of them bring it up.
They don’t bother to sleep top and tail, anymore.
That first winter, Merlin’s magic keeps the cottage warm. Arthur secretly wishes he wouldn’t; he wants any excuse to sleep curled around Merlin, the palm of his hand pressed flat to Merlin’s stomach, his hip, his heart.
“Forgot how much I loved cleaning up after you,” Merlin grouses as the sheets strip themselves. Arthur reaches over to cuff the back of his head, and comes up with only air.
He gives Merlin a pointy hat for his birthday.
“Dragoon’s going bald,” he says. He wrinkles his nose exaggeratedly. “It’s not a look.”
There’s a little boat with the cottage as well. They go floating out across the lake, sometimes all day, drifting when Arthur gets tired of rowing and Merlin is too lazy to push them around with magic. Arthur catches fish. It’s not something he’d ever had time for, as the King.
Magic or not, Arthur can still dump Merlin in the lake and leave him there, yelling.
Dragoon is turning all his students into animals today, and they’re giggling and shrieking about which sort they want to be. Arthur casts Dragoon an amused look from under the tree.
“Do me too, won’t you?”
“Really.”
“Come on, Dragoon. I’m allowed to have a little fun.”
They become fish that day, and Dragoon takes them swimming in the lake. Arthur gets to feel impressive and useful again when he saves them all from a rather nasty pike that Dragoon informs them is the King. Arthur knocks his hat off without looking over.
Sometimes, Merlin will turn just the two of them into animals. Arthur likes this best, because he can see Merlin then, and touch him.
Tonight, Merlin turns them both into owls. Arthur tries to show off for Merlin and catch a mouse, but it’s more difficult than it looks. Even as an owl, he can tell when Merlin’s laughing at him.
They stay out for hours, hooting at each other from separate trees.
When they get back, it’s again like he’s the only one in the cottage. Finally, Arthur snaps.
“Why won’t you let me see you?”
Merlin doesn’t answer. Arthur doesn’t think he comes in that night, either.
In the morning, Merlin is not there. No cupboards open of their own accord; plants don’t move around in the garden. When Arthur calls for him, there’s no answer.
He has a moment of sheer, blinding terror – he wouldn’t leave, he wouldn’t, he promised – and then the front door opens and Arthur feels like an idiot.
“Where’ve you been?” he asks conversationally, as though he had not spent the last half hour in a state of panic.
When he turns around, something warm and soft is placed in his arms. His heart leaps for a moment, and then he registers the fur and just how fast the tiny heartbeat is.
As the creature leaves Merlin’s hands for Arthur’s, it becomes visible. Arthur is holding a greyhound puppy. It licks him and then sneezes.
“I don’t want you to feel you have to be alone,” Merlin tells him, low, and Arthur wants to scream, he wants to hit him, he wants to tell him he’s the best and most beautiful thing in this whole stupid world, he wants to cry and crawl inside him and never leave.
“I’m not,” he says instead, rolling his eyes. “You should know that better than anyone, Merlin.”
The Eurasian eagle owl at one time did live in Great Britain as naturally occurring species, though the exact date is unknown. Some experts have claimed that it was about ten thousand years ago, but fossil remains indicate that the eagle owl occurred as recently as the birth of Christ.
Arthur has lived all his life in this country, and it has never bloomed like this. Magic, Merlin says, and Arthur can hear the smirk in his voice.
It’s more than that, though. It’s not that the grass is thicker, or the flowers more fragrant. It’s that he can enjoy it like a child again, finally: peace without wondering how long it will last.
The brother of one of Dragoon’s students has no magic himself, but being tremendously in awe of the former King, he comes by often, too. Arthur means to recommend him to Elaine to squire when he’s old enough. His name is Thomas Malory, and it’s nearly fifteen months before Arthur finds out Merlin has been telling him a highly fictionalized tale of the Life and Times of Arthur Pendragon.
“You are such a shit, you are such- Just how many tournaments do you think I was in?”
“It was a lot, you prat! You didn’t have to polish all the armor!”
“I thought about it, you know,” he says conversationally. “How long have you been training to be a prat, my lord? I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I-” He clears his throat and makes himself say it. There have never been any secrets, on his end, at least. “I’ve never- come so hard in my life.”
Merlin doesn’t answer, but Arthur is sure he’s listening.
With the wound in his side, it will be hard to get up later, but it’s worth it. He is laying out in the grass by the lake, watching the sparks Merlin makes on the water: a picture show of an impossibly young prince and his servant on a quest to save a unicorn. This prince knows his servant is a sorcerer, and the two fight side by side, in the light. The smile the sorcerer gives the prince when he does magic for him is blinding.
He wishes he could’ve seen it: Merlin, in action. He knows Merlin was there for all of it – Morgana and Mordred and Morgause and every battle he’d ever fought in – but, well: the prince in Merlin’s story looks so happy.
He knows better than to say it, though.
“I wonder how Elaine’s doing.”
“Obviously fine, or do you think we wouldn’t have heard about a war, or an invasion of giant chimeras?”
“Shut up, Merlin.”
“Do you just say that when you can’t think of anything else?” Arthur doesn’t condescend to answer, and Merlin adds, softer: “We can go back, you know. If you miss it.”
I’ll always miss it, Arthur thinks.
“I did say I would,” he says.
He doesn’t bother telling Merlin he oughtn’t to come too; it’s not like he would be able to stop him either way.
The castle looks smaller than he had remembered, though he has only been gone a few years. Elaine doesn’t run down the steps to hug him like she had done when she had been nine and he had been away on a quest; she welcomes him graciously and waits to hug him in private. With a strange, sweet ache, he remembers when his life had been that one.
“Mother and Dad have missed you so much,” she tells him. It makes him smile.
Guinevere cries when she sees him and tells him never to leave it so long again. He kisses her on the cheek but makes no promises. This castle, this land does not belong to him anymore. He had given her up, because he could no longer serve her. She doesn’t need him.
Elaine has given him his old chambers again. It’s a shock, walking in there: the red drapes have the tiny holes his fingers remember, though his mind has forgotten. There is a burn on the desk from where he knocked over a lamp when he was twelve. There is the chair he had always said was more comfortable than the others, and had made Merlin move them around until he found it.
That’s the thing about Camelot. There has been no life without it.
There’s a feast that night, of course, but the more important part is the way that everyone makes their way to Lancelot and Guinevere’s chambers afterwards. Elyan and Leon and Percival and Elaine and Galahad and Guinevere and Lancelot and Arthur himself, and though Elaine and Galahad head off pretty soon, the rest of them talk long into the night.
“I was the one who broke out the druid boy, back when Morgana was still here,” Arthur admits to Leon, who looks shocked and appalled and tells Arthur just how much trouble he’d been in with Uther for that.
He and Guinevere stay up long past the others, and Guinevere mentions absent friends. Arthur knows Merlin is just behind him, and he wants so badly to see him that his throat burns.
When Arthur leaves Guinevere and Lancelot’s chambers, he does not go to his own. The moon is out, and he walks laboriously up to the North Tower.
He touches the table where long ago Merlin had left him a letter from his mother. The chair she had sat in while pregnant with him. Where Merlin had first willingly shown him his magic. This tower had held the best parts of his life for many years.
“It’s fine if you want to come back,” Merlin says.
“Oh, Merlin,” Arthur sighs. “You really are a complete moron.”
The owl is still here. At night, Arthur can hear her. She hasn’t given up waiting for her mate to respond.
He spars with Galahad in the morning and laughs at how easily Galahad knocks him down. Galahad is First Knight now; Leon and Elyan are both on the council. Leon looks positively ancient; Arthur remembers how he and Merlin had used to snicker at his father’s council members. He had reprimanded Merlin for talking that way of his betters, but he’d never actually done anything to stop him, and he wonders how much of that Merlin had noticed.
“He’s given me a couple falls, too, Sire.” Lancelot hands him a jug of water, which Arthur downs half of and then pours over his head.
“I believe it,” he says ruefully. “I mean, if he could best me, you’re certainly not going to be a problem.”
To his relief, Lancelot smiles, and they stand at the edge of the field and watch Galahad fight.
Arthur can’t help but wonder if this is how it could’ve been for him. If there had been a chance of this, if he had swallowed his righteousness and his pride.
Sister and brother, Queen and First Knight. He’s not sure he and Morgana could have ever agreed on anything without coming to blows first, but Gods, he wishes he had tried.
“What are you doing here?” Morgana demands. She’s holding a candle in one hand and piece of parchment and a crumpled quill in the other. A small dagger is tucked into the belt of her dressing gown. She’s very pale, as though she has had a fright, and all around her candle the darkness of the castle presses in.
Arthur scoffs. “I could ask the same to you. You know the King won’t like you being out in the castle at night alone.”
“You’re alone. And I couldn't sleep; I had a nightmare.”
Arthur smirks. “I’m the prince.”
Morgana purses her lips. Then she draws herself up proudly, raises her chin, and announces, “I’m making a map.”
Arthur frowns. “Of the castle? There are only four or five or those already.” He rolls his eyes.
Morgana’s mouth folds in on itself and she glares at him. “I just want to, that’s all.”
“Is that my dagger?”
“Is it?” Morgana smiles graciously, like Arthur has done her a great favor. “I hadn’t noticed. Do you want to see my map so far?”
Arthur recognizes this for a blatant misdirection, but before he can decline, Morgana unfolds her piece of parchment and holds the candle over it. When their heads lean together, Morgana’s dark braided hair brushes Arthur’s shoulder. The map between them is a bundle of crossed out lines, not quite straight.
“That’s it?”
“I’ve just started the North Tower,” Morgana snaps. She pulls her dressing gown closer about her. “I’ve done all the West already. And I’d like to see you do better.”
“I don’t need to, because I can use a real map.”
Morgana sighs dramatically. “Well, if you don’t want to help-”
“Oh, so you need my help?” But Arthur’s smiling, growing wider and wider, and after rolling her eyes, Morgana laughs. And when she does so, even inside the stone walls of the castle, sunlight bounces out of her throat.
Arthur leaves Camelot after a week. He promises to come again next year, and he will, because he always keeps his promises, and because Camelot will always be his home. But as he rides out of the gates, he knows that in that year he will not miss it.
They had gone out on the lake in the early morning and have just come back. Arthur sits with his feet in the water, shelling peas, while Merlin shells ten times as fast with magic.
Arthur angles himself so his head is pressed against Merlin’s calf. It twitches, but Merlin doesn’t move away. Arthur grins to himself.
When the peas are done, they settle themselves in dappling sunlight. Archimedes (“It’s a majestic name!” “Okay.”) comes to sniff at them, and upon realizing they don’t have any food except peas, pads into the water for a swim. He will come back in twenty minutes and spray them with water, but Arthur is too content to move.
How differently his life could’ve gone; how easily it all could’ve fallen apart.
He thinks again of Morgana. Of all the people he had betrayed to get here, in the sunlight.
He thinks of the things you lose, and the things you leave behind.
He turns and pulls himself to his knees. Merlin makes a soft, questioning sound at his movement, like he’d been dozing, and Arthur’s heart swells to hear it. He reaches out, where he knows Merlin will be, just behind him and to the right, like always, and touches.
He catches something that might be a ribcage, and slides his hand awkwardly up Merlin’s neck to his face. Arthur’s thumb catches on Merlin’s chin. Merlin is very still, and much too tense to be dozing any longer.
Arthur crawls over him to crouch over his lap. It pulls at the old wound in his side, but he ignores it. He touches his fingers to Merlin’s mouth, to the soft skin just next to it. Merlin is invisible still, but they are so close that Arthur can feel the heat coming off him.
“Arthur,” Merlin says tiredly, “you can’t even see me.”
It’s difficult to breathe.
“I don’t care.” It’s so true; Gods, it’s so true it’s humiliating and his eyes prick, but he doesn’t care. “I’ve been in love with you,” he gets out, wet, “all my life.”
Merlin makes a choked noise. He doesn’t move, neither forward nor back.
“You don’t know me.”
“I do,” Arthur counters. “For God’s sake, I’ve never known anyone but you. And you were the one who said that didn’t matter.”
“You don’t know the things I’ve done.”
No, Arthur thinks, because you won’t tell me.
“Please,” he says instead.
Fifty years is a long time to love someone and not kiss them. Merlin makes a sound like Arthur has hurt him, but Arthur wouldn’t, Arthur couldn’t. And then, suddenly, there is a man under him.
Arthur doesn’t recognize him. He’s not as old as Dragoon. His cheeks are clean-shaven – unlike Arthur, who has grown a beard he is too lazy to shave. His eyes are sharper than before, perhaps, and surrounded by lines like bird’s wings. His hair is as white as Dragoon’s, though, and it hangs to his chin. It’s tied back low on his neck with a leather cord, and it looks shockingly good on him, drawing the line where his jaw and ear and neck all meet into focus. It makes Arthur’s mouth water. But the thing that gets him, the thing that really gets him-
“Are you still wearing those damn neckerchiefs?”
Merlin half-laughs, half-sobs, like it’s been wrenched out of him, and Arthur kisses it out of his mouth.
She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer.
They aren’t really kissing so much as Merlin is crying horrible gasping sobs into Arthur’s mouth as he shakes apart. He locks his legs around Arthur’s and clings to Arthur’s hair and hand, fingers biting into the veins on the back of it. It’s awful to watch: an old man, ancient and ashamed, crying as a child. Merlin has lived his whole life from start to end and has grown sickened over nearly all of it. Clumsily, Arthur presses kisses to his cheek and the corner of his mouth over and over and says nothing.
But Merlin had cried when Arthur had found out about his magic, too. They have come around full circle, and come out the stronger for it.
“I never would’ve hurt you,” Arthur murmurs. “I changed the law; I wanted you to come back. I never-” His voice croaks out and becomes breath: “-even believed you’d actually leave.”
Merlin makes a hysterical choking noise. “You think I gave a damn about the law? It was never about the magic!”
“The lies? You had to know I’d forgiven-”
“Everyone who ever betrayed you- it was my fault first.”
Arthur waits.
“I told you I’d do anything in the world for you. I wasn’t-” Merlin laughs, but it sounds like he would rather throw a plate against the wall. “I wasn’t lying, Arthur. You know, for once. I’ve done- some- things.” He swallows. “For you. To keep you safe, to keep your kingdom safe. By the end, I did what you despised: I didn’t care about what was- right, or- or honorable, or what would help the people of your kingdom. I only cared about you.” When he looks at Arthur, he is eighteen again, and this time it’s not the magic. “You are,” Merlin tells him, almost angrily, “the best man that I’ve ever known. You were a great king because you are a great man, and because of that, you can’t- forgive the things I’ve done.”
Arthur smirks. “Merlin, the day you met me, I was throwing knives at a servant boy. I’m pretty sure I can forgive whatever it is you’ve done.”
“I’ve done a lot worse than throw knives at a servant boy,” Merlin says under his breath, like this is supposed to shock Arthur. The man hid from him for fifty years; he assumes it’s pretty bad.
“And there was a shield in front of him,” Merlin mutters. “It wasn’t like you were going to hit him,” and Arthur throws back his head and laughs.
“You know, Merlin,” he drawls. “I’m a prince, so we can’t be friends. But if I wasn’t a prince – I think we’d probably get on.”
Yeah, well, if you weren’t a prince, I’d tell you to mind your own damn business.
“So that means you can tell me,” Arthur adds, in that tone that’s half a coax, half a bully, just as he had when they were boys and he had told the inn keeper that he and his servant were to be put in the same room, at his request and on his coin, without bothering to think about why, simply because he had liked being around him. “Tell me.”
Merlin hesitates.
“Let me in,” Arthur says. He presses his hand to Merlin’s chest, just above his heart. “Let me in here.”
Merlin does.