Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Prologue

Camlann, 537 AD

Arthur laid with the side of his face cushioned on a boot print pressed deep into the bloody mud. He could taste copper on his own breath, and frothed around his lips. The scent of death overwhelmed that of horses and unwashed hoards of men – a reek like bile-eroded kidneys wafting on the fetid breath of an old, dying man. The stench of living decay. His head roiled, thoughts pulling apart like spun sugar in a barrel as what remained of his life narrowed to the experience of breathing and pain. He wasn’t sure, but he might have lost consciousness at some point; it felt like he might be waking up, but moments blurred in his mind like paint smearing into a single color, brushed and coated over his eyes. A parade of imagined faces passed in front of him, projected like scrying magic in a copper bowl of water-logged memories. His own life distilled, fading before him.

Guinevere, smiling at him – loving him. You gave us hope. Something to believe in.

Uther, frowning in disappointment with a knotted brow. It is your duty to strengthen and protect the kingdom. You have failed.

Morgana teasing, then sad, then unrecognizable with madness and rage. This time it seems there really is no way out.

Gaius, unreadable as he ever was. One day, you will learn, Arthur. One day, you will understand.

Even Lancelot, dim as the altered shade that once visited them after he died. The honor is all mine, sire. Because it was an honor to die twice for Arthur’s cause. For Merlin.

People he knew over the years, nameless knights and soldiers, staring sightless at him in death. Druids. Criminals. The innocent dead. The downtrodden, and the supplicant. A middle-aged wild man chained in cold iron to a stake, watching him with Merlin’s eyes before Arthur knew what they looked like, forgiving the child holding the torch for bearing his father’s sins. Even Merlin himself, just looking at him from the edges of Arthur’s field of vision. Always there in the background, and never smiling. Because he didn’t smile anymore when Arthur thought of him.

Arthur’s gut burned, everything hot where the blade had pierced him. He saw Leon’s boot land near his head as he fought to drive away the Saxons seeking to finish Arthur off. They already stole his standard; Arthur could see it flying among the Saxon hoards, his golden dragon swimming in a sea of red, bloody and torn.

A haze was falling over the battlefield, or maybe it was just the veil pulling closed in Arthur’s eyes; he didn’t know. Someone fell nearby – the thick slap of a slain carcass thumping limp and lifeless to the ground – and Arthur’s body lurched as hands grabbed his shoulders, shook him, and then slipped beneath his arms to haul him from the filth. A thick bubble of brackish blood rose like gorge in Arthur’s throat, and he coughed it violently at whoever mercilessly yanked at him, forcing him to his numb, useless feet. It was gut blood. Bile blood. The blade that pierced him punctured his stomach and intestines. A mortal blow. Arthur raised his gaze and slurred, “Leon.”

Leon’s eyes were huge, his beard and neck covered in gore, and now in Arthur’s own death knell, crimson on silver armor – bright Pendragon red. Like the flags flying high from his castle towers. Like the spatter of breath from Merlin’s pierced lung on Samhain – bright spots of color drying to rust on the glory of shining metal.

“You are wounded,” Leon said unnecessarily.

“I can still fight,” Arthur gasped.

Leon braced Arthur on his feet by the sheer force of his disbelief and looked down. Only stillness betrayed his realization of the depth of the blow that felled Arthur. “Sire…”

“Leon, I have to keep fighting. If they see me dead, they’ll flee, and the Saxons will route them as they run.”

Faraway in the field, they both heard Merlin begin screaming Arthur’s name. Searching for him. Dammit, he wasn’t supposed to be here. Arthur took steps to ensure he wouldn’t be here for this. Leon twisted his upper body around, drawing breath to yell their location. But then he just held that putrid air in his lungs while his sallow eyes sought out the miniscule shape of their sorcerer pelting his way through the battlefield with a single, mindless purpose. Calling Arthur’s name.

“Leon,” Arthur rasped. “Give me your horse. Now. I can still lead a charge.”

Leon slowly turned his head back and locked eyes with Arthur. In the background, Merlin kept on crying out, the sound of his voice dimming in Arthur’s ears as the rest of the cacophony did, bleeding into quiet just as Arthur himself was.

“Leon, please!” Arthur begged, staggering forward. Or trying to. His ability to remain upright depended entirely on Leon’s iron grasp. “I cannot let my people be slaughtered. Please. I know it’s over for me, but it doesn’t have to be the end for them. Just get me on a horse, and then get Merlin back off the field. Tell him I’m fine. I knocked myself out on a rock or something, nothing pierced my armor – he thinks I’m an oaf, he’ll believe whatever lie you tell him. Just get him out.”

The atmosphere grew heavy and strange. A muted blanket of air descended as Arthur caught sight of Merlin scattering men from his path as he ran – literally scattering them with sweeps of his staff and blades of magic. He hadn’t seen Arthur yet. Merlin’s mouth moved with his frantic cries, but Arthur couldn’t hear them anymore. He couldn’t hear anything except for Leon’s breathing picking up in panic, and his own rasping coughs. When Arthur sought to meet Leon's eyes, Leon wasn't paying attention to him anymore. He was staring past Arthur's shoulder, and he looked petrified.

“What is it?” Arthur demanded, nearly breathless with pain. Not another charge. Not another fresh band of Saxons, please. “On…on me, Leon. What – ” Arthur hissed in pain and forced his body not to fall yet. Struggling to keep his feet, Arthur looked behind him. Merlin did say he would fall by a lake, so of course, there it was. Still waters, smooth and clear as glass, reflecting a dim, pale sky. If he were being fanciful – or if he were inclined toward flights of girliness like Merlin – he might even call the little pink and white specks dotting the surface pretty, like apple blossoms. No apple trees bloomed this dark spring, though, so it must have been some kind of litter from the battlefield fouling the pristine waters, reflecting a dim red sun at perpetual dusk.

Arthur’s head grew too heavy to hold up at that odd angle, and he let himself sag toward Leon, his brow low, fighting a wave of dizziness and nausea. “No. I’m not done yet.”

“He was right,” Leon breathed, his eyes still fixed on what lay beyond them.

“No.” Arthur locked his knees, but he couldn’t stand without Leon’s continued support.

His voice faint and shaking, Leon informed him, “Sire, you have been dealt a fatal blow.” As if Arthur didn’t already know that.

Enraged, Arthur shouted, “I can still fight!” He shoved at Leon, who thankfully maintained his grasp because Arthur’s knees folded once again. Back down in the muck, Arthur cast a frantic glance over his shoulder. He only meant it to last a moment – just one. Just long enough to make his refusal clear and confirm that nothing was there at all except a wider field of slaughter, but his gaze caught and stilled on a shining form seated at the bow of a ghostly boat, crowned in jewels and gold. His faltering life a tatter of air in his throat, Arthur breathed, “Guinevere.”

She was not alone. Morgana lifted her head, too, hooded and robed. And then another woman he didn’t know stood up and stepped out onto the water. She was clad in shimmering samite that blended into the still surface of the lake as if she were part of it, a vision out of place among the warring and the dead. Her dark hair stirred in the breeze, and her overlarge eyes did not blink. She folded her hands, watching him, and waited.

“No,” Arthur moaned again, caught on his knees and unable to stand again. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. His body was just desperate to comfort him in his moment of dying. He tore his eyes from the vision and grabbed Leon by the collar of his chainmail. “Leon. Leon, get me on a horse.” If he could ride a charge one more time…just one, it might be enough. If he could just do that, then Merlin wouldn’t come across him bleeding out in the filth of this nonexistent shoreline. If they could survive until nightfall, they could regroup. Arthur just needed time to regroup. “This day is not yet done.”

Leon swallowed and ripped his gaze from what waited past Arthur's shoulder. The battle raged behind him, and Camelot was losing. Albion was falling even as they watched. Through the path of carnage, Merlin searched for his king, growing more frantic by the second. And more violent. The only thing that really made Merlin lose himself and his scruples… If Arthur died before he reached them… If Arthur died, and Merlin saw it like this, in that state…

“You have to get me on a horse. The men can’t know how badly I’m wounded.” Merlin couldn’t know how badly Arthur was wounded – not yet. He would break the world if he did.

Leon took several deep, rapid breaths, and finally met Arthur’s gaze again. “You can’t ride like this.”

“What else am I supposed to do?” Arthur demanded.

“Let them take you.”

Frustrated and terrified, and only half paying attention through his muddling thoughts and his fading consciousness, Arthur snapped, “Take me where?”

“Away from him.”

Arthur’s breath stilled, but only for a moment. When it resumed, he lifted his chin and pinned Leon with a dark and shuddering gaze. Everything around them crashed and tumbled through his awareness with a clarity that Arthur had never known before. Ever. It was surreal – unfettered reality sharp as knives. Culmination. "What did you just say?"

"It is the boat of Avalon, and it's come for you." Leon fell to his knees as well and grabbed Arthur’s shoulders, the touch dull through a thick layer of chainmail and blood loss. “We are losing. Albion is falling, Arthur. Right now, on this field.”

Arthur shook his head and insisted, “No. We were promised a golden age, and I am sworn to deliver it. Merlin – ”

“That blow is fatal!” Leon shouted, though his voice came paradoxically faint. “If Merlin saves you from it, whose life do you think he’ll trade?”

“Merlin shouldn’t even be here!” Arthur yelled in Leon’s face. He shook his head, but he couldn’t stem the tide of Leon’s words, or the truth of them. Merlin was there. He was always there. At Arthur’s side, until the end. Like he promised.

"I'll help you," Leon offered, desperate and shaking. He was actually shaking. 

Arthur smacked his hands away and barked, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

“Yes.” Leon’s chest heaved with the breath he took, and just as quickly expelled. “I am asking you to choose: One man, or the kingdom.”

“Fuck you,” Arthur swore. “I made an oath – ”

“What of your oath to the crown?” Leon demanded. “Which broken vow is the lesser evil? We cannot win this battle with sword and shield. If Merlin reaches you – if he spares you now, it will kill him, and we will have no defense left at all. You’ll only be slain again in the routing – all of us will. We are outnumbered, Arthur. We have been outflanked, some of our men have already surrendered and found no mercy. Even if we sound the retreat, there is nowhere left for us to flee, to say nothing of the innocents in the hillsides and villages who will be set upon and slaughtered next.”

That may be true, but Arthur promised. He promised. But Leon was right – if Merlin saved his life, he would use his own to do it. The old religion required balance, and the death given Arthur today had to be accounted for somewhere. Someone’s body had to pay. Neither Merlin nor Arthur would ever ask someone else to agree to die for him, by magic, cold and considered like trading pieces on a tafl board. (The way Uther did, Arthur thought and then pushed aside. He was not his father.) But Arthur knew what Leon wasn’t saying. He knew exactly what would come next if Arthur didn’t let Merlin save him. So he said it himself. “Leon, if he sees me dead, he will slaughter them.”

“Yes.” Leon swallowed as if it pained him, and nodded once, definitive. “He will. And he won’t stop with this one field.”

Arthur’s gaze flit between Leon and the distant figure of a warlock straightening in the distance as he finally spotted them. "You..." he started. Then more firmly, "You mean for me to do that deliberately."

Leon's face crimped in shame, but he nodded again.

“I cannot make a monster of him,” Arthur replied, choking on his own blood. “A weapon. He is not a weapon. Leon, he will become everything he always feared he might be.” Arthur knew there was no saving himself at this point – he did. But Merlin… Merlin could still be saved.

He must have said that part out loud, because Leon’s face cracked. “At what price, Arthur? What would you even be saving him for, at this point? Whether you die now, like this, or an hour from now in the final sweep, his life – this life – is over.”

No, it wasn’t. Merlin could still live. He could still… He could live. Eventually. If he fled with the few survivors. Which he wouldn’t. Arthur knew he wouldn’t, else he wouldn’t have tried so hard to keep Merlin from this field today. Because Arthur saw it coming to this. He saw it when they set camp the day before on the wrong side of the hill, on the low ground. He saw it when the scouts brought back their reports that evening, and in the enemy lines waiting for them at dawn. This was not a battle that Arthur could win. It was a last stand. An end.

“This is what he’s for,” Leon insisted, though it visibly hurt him to say it. “If he is Emrys, then he is a savior. Everything he was told, everything they tried to make him – they were wrong about how, but not about the end purpose. He isn’t a liberator; he is retribution. Emrys is the Old Religion, Arthur. He is the elemental and undying force of this land, and this land is you. The moment he sees that the Saxons have defiled this land – that they have defiled you…” Leon shook his head. He was talking about those mysterious wild magics again. The kind he never truly did explain to Arthur – the kind he insisted couldn’t be spoken of without calling them up. Except they were here. It was here, so why bother with secrets now?

And yes, Emrys could be all of that, perhaps. But Arthur wasn’t talking about him. He was talking about Merlin. Just Merlin. “It will ruin him.”

Leon shook his head, his voice shivering like dandelion puffs fighting the breeze, “Arthur, he’s ruined either way. Whether he dies giving life to you, or you condemn him to live, it’s over. You are dying, and there is no coming back from this now.”

Helpless with that knowledge – and that Arthur’s own attempt to thwart this end, and keep Merlin away, was likely the only reason Eda got close enough to render him his final blow – Arthur breathed again, “I gave my word.”

Leon nodded. It was surrender. “I know. But he’s the only hope we have left. His vengeance will deliver us.” He lowered his eyes and swallowed hard. “Arthur, he told you it would come to this. We all knew it was coming to this. Neither one of you was ever meant to be the wheat. He didn’t give you a plow; he gave you a sword. You are the blood in the field. And he is a dragonlord. Fire is his blood.”

Hearth fires, Arthur thought. Cooking fires. Home, safe fires. Not the char of bodies. Arthur squeezed his eyes shut, but he had no right to shield himself from the consequences of his own actions. From the fruit his reign finally bore. Arthur may not have caused the darkness or the famines or the invasions, but his response to them was his responsibility and his alone. The atrocities he asked of his men, for the good of the realm or not, were on him. Leon was right; Arthur would die today. The only choice was how, and who he would take with him. As king, Arthur had to consider the kingdom before all else, and to hell with the single life of any one man. Worse, Merlin would probably forgive him for it later, if he blamed Arthur at all. I’m not going to forgive you being a good king. That is what I love about you. He loved that Arthur could switch off his heart and his humanity, and see to the needs of the people with the sort of cold calculation that served greater goods, but gave no quarter to love. Like Uther. Merlin loved the part of Arthur that reminded Arthur most of Uther. There are certain things that are more important than love.

A lull in the screaming drew Arthur’s attention. He forced himself to look up and watch Merlin staring at him from across the length of an entire battlefield. The distance could have been nothing. The desperate fight for survival roiling between them was as a swarm of mosquitoes, and nothing more. Merlin must not have been able to see the death wound, because he would have frozen the world if he had, to reach Arthur in time. One precarious man, racing death. Small mercies, Arthur supposed, that Merlin took the human route and simply ran. Merlin was made for running, he thought in absent fashion. He was made to blur. They would never see him coming.

Arthur couldn’t draw full breaths anymore, but he spoke in spite of it, as if that were the only way his lungs might keep drawing air as the rest of his body slowly ceased to feel or function. “On the Saxons there will be slaughter with ashen spears, and a battle to make madmen shriek.”

Alarmed, Leon said, “Arthur?”

“That’s what he said,” Arthur babbled nonsensically. “To his apple tree. When he told me about the bloodshed and death he would cause.”

Leon opened his mouth and then shut it again, visibly frightened. Fair enough; Arthur was talking like Merlin now. That was pretty disquieting. Arthur’s body felt somehow drained and bloated at the same time, and his skin was grey with the loss of blood. With death, coming on like a cavalry charge. Or like a gangly man running with fire in his eyes and carnage leashed to his fingertips. Arthur could feel his abdomen swelling against the inside of his armor from blood spilling out internally, trapped within his skin. Everything in a nimbus around Merlin spattered out of focus as the fray pushed him back on a tide of grappling men, and Merlin refused to be slowed by it. He pierced the fray like a storm cloud poised on the verge of ruin. Like a lance of blinding, fractured light crackling across the sky in the dark.

“Arthur,” Leon breathed, the word a tremble of air between them. “You have to choose.”

Merlin was a blaze of red and gold on the field. Blood and magic. Horrendous awe. He was magnificent, and it was a thing of nightmare to see. No wonder the old religion always inspired such fear with its reverence. The Saxons would fall like wet paper walls before him, the moment he broke. All it needed was a catalyst. One single reason to let the rest of his faltering inhibitions go, and allow himself vengeance against the world for what it did to him. For what it made him. For tying him irrevocably to a man doomed to nobly give all to his kingdom, and fall.

“Arthur, please.”

He had to do it. Arthur’s vision blurred and streaked. He had to. It wasn't about Arthur or Merlin, or their oaths or their shattered hearts. It was about a kingdom that didn't deserve to be destroyed. It was about thousands of screaming, innocent people who didn't deserve to die. It was impossible not to hear them all screaming.

Arthur's lungs seized and spasmed as he lunged forward to grab Leon by the beard, twisting the hair on his jaw, rough and furious to convey to another the pain of his own breaking heart. With his eyes drilling into Leon’s so that he wouldn’t be tempted to look at what fought to reach them, Arthur snarled, “You don’t leave him. Ever. Do you hear me?” He let his vision swim to obscure the sight beyond Leon’s shoulder. He couldn’t watch this. He couldn’t watch a good man’s love for him turn to fire and retribution. If that was all that loving Arthur was good for, then he regretted ever trying to be the sort of man that inspired others to feel it. Better that he had stayed a bully and become a tyrant, than grow to be loved. “You stay with him, Leon. You don’t ever let him be alone. I don’t ever want him to feel that he’s alone.”

“He won’t be,” Leon assured him, just as intent.

“You follow him wherever he goes,” Arthur pressed through clenched teeth and the overwhelming taste of salt mixing with the blood and bile on his lips. “For however long he walks this land, and you – you don’t ever betray him like I’m doing now, do you understand? You put him first, before everything. Before kingdoms, before wives – you care for him the way I couldn’t. You give him that for me. Swear it.”

“I swear,” Leon breathed. He grasped Arthur’s forearms in a mockery of a knight’s clasp. “On my life. On every life I have.”

Far away across the field, Merlin called Arthur’s name, this time with terrifying intent.

“You have to go,” Leon whispered. Somehow, his words carried through the cacophony of the battle, and the roar of blood that coursed deafening in Arthur’s ears. “If you wait for him to reach you...”

Arthur nodded. He couldn’t say goodbye. Merlin wouldn’t let him go, if Arthur waited long enough for that chance.

“He’ll forgive you,” Leon blurted, fervent and as uncollected as Arthur had ever seen him. “You had no other choice, Arthur.”

There was always a choice. Life was a succession of choices, even if one didn’t know it at the time. This just happened to be Arthur’s – the sum of his choices. “I’m sorry it came to this. I’m sorry I wasn’t better.”

“I know,” Leon replied, his voice breaking along with the creasing of his unaged face, the same age now as Arthur’s though he had lived much longer. “So am I.”

When Leon stood to help Arthur upright again, Arthur brushed him off. He had to do this himself. If Leon helped, Merlin might blame him too. “Get your sword,” Arthur ordered, gasping as he used the last of his strength to gain his feet. Somehow, Excalibur was in Arthur’s hand again. He gripped the hilt tight, and grunted around the pain of a seeping gut wound as he stretched to slide it into his belt. “Go, Leon. Walk away from me now.”

Leon took a step back and watched Arthur stand on the last of his living strength. “Sire.”

Arthur smiled in that manner that he knew exposed the crooked angle of his front teeth. Carefree, he hoped. Confident. Just a little bit cavalier. He could taste the blood in it. “Don’t make a fuss, Leon.”

Leon’s gaze skated sideways, toward the boat and the lake that wasn’t there that morning. Toward Guinevere, who waited to bear Arthur hence. Looking back at Arthur, Leon clenched his swordless hand into a fist and crossed it over his breast. “Sire, I will never again know the honor of serving such a king as you.”

It was too much, even for a moment like this. “Go,” Arthur urged. “I’m putting my hope…” His words faltered, and he heard the screaming start up where Merlin fought to get through to him. The screaming of other men. Of soldiers cut down as they realized what he was, and tried too late to flee. Storms rose fierce and acrid on the wind like a stench of petrichor thick enough to choke a man, and the wind whipped dust and smoke into their eyes. Arthur’s watched Leon’s hair literally raise in a halo all around his head, and felt the prickling across his own scalp as the air crackled with magic discharge. “I’m putting my heart in your hands. Protect it.”

“Always,” Leon assured him, his voice barely there, strong even through its faintness and its cracks.

Arthur nodded and turned his back on the frantic sound of Merlin screaming at him to stop. Begging, commanding…breaking. Guinevere stood at the boat’s stern, holding out her hand. She waited in the brightness to greet the king she once saw in him. Years ago – so many that they seemed like another life – Guinevere stood with him in a ruin beside an old, dirty stone table on the brink of losing the kingdom and said that she was proud of him. So proud of him. She said it again now with her eyes, and with the sadness in them, twined with her love. Pride and sorrow, with all her heart.

The air grew heavy and muffled as the mist swelled in off the lake, obscuring the shore like a shimmering, sheer veil hued in pale shades of grey. Gentle summer storm scents wafted along with it, tinged with a hint of pine and juniper. Guinevere’s form wavered in the boat before him, insubstantial, but she didn’t fade. In fact, even as she seemed to lose definition, her presence solidified into something more real. He felt calm, looking at her. If this was death, it wasn't so bad. He could almost forget that his world was falling to pieces behind him. He could almost forget the sound of his own heart shrieking. Her purple and gold coronation gown glittered and shone like a beacon through the thickening fog, growing fuzzy at the edges, the only spot of color in his grey landscape. With the last of his fading strength, Arthur reached for her hand, expecting nothing from the beautiful illusion. Only hoping.

Her fingers closed over his own, and drew him into the lake.

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CHAPTER ONE

Modern-ish Day, the week following Beltane

Arthur closed the book of his death’s life story and gave the cover a troubled look. So far, this tale seemed some strange mix of misappropriated truth and odd fixations on the new god that Arthur never worshipped himself. He did not even think that there was a bishop called Canterbury in his time, unless that was meant to be Bayard’s idiot bishop. And that stupid stone that Arthur got his sword from was in no churchyard, even though the grove in the forest may have been sacred; he didn’t know. All of this, and they were barely a dozen pages into the massive thing. It did not bode well for the truthfulness of the rest of the book.

Curious, Lainey asked, “What do you think of it?”

“I don’t know,” Arthur admitted. “I ran away once, when I was small. I followed our own Sir Ector back to his castle as one of the staff, and no one among his retinue even noticed me there. When my father eventually found me, he was wroth – fear, of course. He assumed I was kidnapped or killed by his enemies. The whole idea confused me. I remember insisting to him that I was supposed to squire there for Ector’s knights. I was living in his stables the whole time they were searching, and not a single man recognized me as the king’s son, though several should have.”

Lainey frowned across the table and fell conspicuously silent as Gryff walked over to refill their coffee mugs.

Watching Lainey and Gryff both pretend that they did not know what the other knew, Arthur wondered how so many people could keep so many different secrets straight in their heads without buckling. Even the court at Camelot had less intrigue than this little place.

Perfectly congenial, Gryff remarked, “There is actually a story passed down in my family of the summer that young prince Arthur spent happy in a hay loft.”

Narrowing her eyes, Lainey remarked, “That’s a nice shirt you gave him.”

Gryff raised an eyebrow at her. “I found it appropriate.” He set down a fresh pot of cream and then pointedly walked back to the sink where one of the runner boys waited with a parcel.

Lainey hooked her thumb over her shoulder and asked Arthur, “Does he know?”

“He knows everything,” Arthur replied with a wry grimace at the back of a man who knew pretty much every secret that Arthur had.

“Christ,” Lainey muttered. “I thought he might. Does he know I know?”

Arthur bobbed his expression around the crimp of his mouth that Merlin used to tell him made him look like a simpleton. “Do you honestly think that would have gotten past him?”

Lainey fluttered her eyelashes like a deep breath and a sigh all at once. “Nothing else ever does. I guess it was bound to happen; you aren’t exactly subtle with the whole you-thing.”

Arthur glared at her, offended.

Lainey shook her head. “Don’t tell Leon the cat’s out of the bag; he’ll have a meltdown. What made you run off with Sir Ector?”

The abrupt resumption of the earlier topic caught Arthur off guard, but he shrugged his way past the interlude. “I swear, at the time, it felt right. I was, what, eight summers on?” He carefully did not look to Gryff for confirmation. “Maybe ten. It is a hazy memory. Father later convinced himself that I was enchanted into it along with everyone else who saw me there, but if I was, the reason for doing it escapes me.” He picked up his fresh coffee and added his own cream for once.

“That’s…” For once, Lainey seemed genuinely lost for words. Eventually, she settled on, “Odd. Right, and, um. You believe in witchy enchantments, but that makes sense. You’re sort of…old.”

Arthur made a face at her. “No older than you, surely, my lady.”

Absently, Lainey quipped, “Says the magic fossil man.” She tapped at her scry phone a few times and then asked, “How close is the language to tongues you knew?”

“It, um. It is rather malformed,” Arthur replied, once again thrown off by an abruptly changed subject. He sipped his hot, milky coffee brew and hummed in satisfaction. Some things in this terrifying new place were not so bad. “But I do recognize some of it, after a fashion. It is different, but the similarities to several other languages I knew is enough that the learning is easier than it might be. I’m sorry, but what do you keep writing in there?”

“Nothing you need to worry about.” To herself, she muttered, “I need to find a way to publish a paper on this.” She had a notebook nearby, bound in ringed wire, and made some a few scribbles in it while she thought about Arthur’s words. More tapping ensued on her scry phone, and then louder, she guessed, “The Merlin in those passages isn’t yours?”

Arthur set his coffee down and thumbed the gold lettering of his name on the book cover. With the barest of breath behind the words, Arthur told her, “I don’t want to speak of this anymore.”

Lainey watched him for a moment, and then nodded with a sad smile. “Too much, too soon?”

Arthur ignored that, and the sensation in his guts that felt as if he were perched at the edge of a high tower with no one holding there to pull him away from the wind that threatened to topple him off. “I will find some other way to pay you for your lessons.”

“You don’t need to pay me,” Lainey told him. Surely, she learned that gentle tone from Merlin himself – kind sincerity that could only ever cut like knives. “It doesn’t make us less equal to let me give you this as a gift, you know.”

“I don’t know,” Arthur countered, his voice remote and his vision fixed. He continued to pick at the edges of his own name. For every flake of gold he scratched off, an empty indentation in the leather remained. “People don’t give to me like that.”

Lainey frowned somewhere over there in Arthur’s periphery, head cocking to one side. “Without strings?”

Faint as the breath that vied for stagnancy in his lungs, Arthur replied, “Nothing is ever given to a king without the expectation of getting something in return.” He flicked away the last gilded bit of the letter A in his name, and then looked down to his right. “I apologize, my lady. I thought…” He didn’t know what he thought. That he owed her his person in exchange for words that felt hollow on a page?

A hand fell over Arthur’s where it continued to fidget at the edges of the book on the table. “Arthur,” Lainey said, forceful and yet soft. “You can just say it hurts too much to talk about yet. I get that. I really do.”

“It’s not pain,” Arthur argued, staring at the curl of her fingers attempting to still his. “It’s just wrong. It’s wrong, everything is so wrong here.” He slid his hand out from under hers and nudged the book away across the table. “That’s not me. That’s not any of us, it’s…” He shook his head and only then realized how his voice trembled to betray his muted distress. “It’s a lie.”

Lainey watched the book slide in increments away from Arthur, and then intercepted it before he could push it clear off the table. “Then we won’t look at it again. Consider it gone.”

“It’s not gone, though.” It was Arthur that was gone. It was Merlin, his Merlin, not there at all.

“Okay,” Lainey agreed, her tone meant to mollify him. “Okay, let’s be done with this for today, hm?”

The book disappeared onto the floor where Arthur couldn’t see it anymore. He didn’t try to stop her, but he still protested, “I must still give you something for your time.”

Lainey nodded, stopped, and then shook her head as if she didn’t know what to do with that. “You don’t – ”

“I have taken your time,” Arthur insisted. “A finite resource. You cannot give it away for free – it will run out.” Mostly to himself, Arthur mumbled, “Mine did. And nothing in it will ever come back.”

Lainey blinked at him, her lips parted mid-thought, and then she looked down to breath through her mouth as if the breath pained her. “Okay.” And again, on another shallow exhale, “Okay. Then…okay, your sword. Will you show me your sword? I didn’t get as close a look as I wanted before.”

Arthur made a face, but obliged her by drawing it free and setting it on the table. He kept it near the edge, though, and warned her off touching it with a conflicted stare. “Excalibur.”

After giving Arthur a careful look, Lainey picked up her scry phone and pointed it at the sword. Arthur tensed at the undeserved suspicion that she might be trying to affect its magic with her own, but after her scry phone merely clicked a few times, he gradually relaxed again. No magic scented the air in warning, and at her prompting, he turned the blade to show her the other side as well. It took him a moment to realize that she was capturing little still moments like what he saw on the walls of Leon’s room. But how did they turn into shiny paper, if they were trapped under the water glass?

Lainey noticed the perturbed look on his face and made a sheepish gesture with her scry phone. “Just taking photos.”

Arthur didn’t reply and she went back to clicking the little water-glass box at various angles to his sword. The method of getting those little moments onto paper was probably similar to what Merlin did to put Arthur’s face on his identification card. Except, that was magic. And everyone kept insisting that these little black boxes were not magical objects. Maybe they didn’t know? If Merlin gave these things to his staff to make their jobs easier, and he didn’t know that at least some of them knew what he was, he certainly wouldn’t tell them they were magic. And yet, how could it have escaped them? Those devices were fantastical. Merlin might be an oblivious buffoon half the time, but everyone else wasn’t. Arthur narrowed his eyes at Lainey, and then quickly hid his suspicion by fingering the blade of his sword.

If Lainey noticed his odd retrospection, she didn’t mention it. “That’s Ogham script, isn’t it?”

“Mm.” Arthur curled his thumbnail around the etchings facing him. He felt as if he might not be in his moment with her. Perhaps he wasn’t.

“Can you read it?”

Arthur stirred himself as if returning from a great distance, and pretended interest. “Yes. Learned by necessity.”

Lainey made an impatient gesture. “Why would you need to know Ogham? It wasn’t used where and when you’re from.”

That sort of phrasing was starting to unsettle Arthur. When you’re from. When you lived. It wasn’t a natural way to talk about a life that he felt he was still living. “Not conventionally, no.” Arthur sighed and stroked the gleaming metal. It was tarnished. He needed to get Merlin to clean it properly. “There were old scrolls in our archives written in that language, and I think the druids might have used it in ceremonial inscriptions. I know it from Merlin, though; it was one of the scripts he used sometimes when he wrote my speeches. I had to learn enough to figure out what the hell he expected me to say.”

“I see.” She clearly didn’t, and they both knew it. Rather than pressing the point, Lainey jutted her chin at the sword again. “So where’d you really get that thing?”

An involuntary hint of humor crossed Arthur’s face, and he guffawed lightly without looking away from the muted shine of enchanted metal. “Merlin.” Arthur pulled at the hem of his tunic and used it to buff his fingerprints from the shining blade. “That ninny stuck it in a rock in the middle of the bloody woods, and then told me an absolutely rubbish story to convince me to pull it out in front of half my court. More lies, of course.” He picked at a fleck of dirt with his fingernail and smiled fondly at the blade sitting before him as proxy.

Lainey watched Arthur polish his sword with as little expression as she could probably manage. With forced nonchalance, she remarked, “So, you actually pulled a sword called Excalibur out of a stone to prove to your court that you were the rightful heir of Camelot?”

“No,” Arthur replied with a chuckle, remembering both his own boyish complaints at the time, and the terror of thinking he’d fail if he even tried. As Merlin would have ever let that happen. Gods, they were so young then. So untested. Full of potential that neither of them could have imagined at the time. So bright. “No one doubted my legitimacy. Merlin tricked me into pulling it out of a stone to prove to myself that I was worthy of being king.” He stopped scrubbing the gleaming metal and tugged his shirt back down while surveying his handywork. “I wasn’t as sure as he was, but Merlin had this way of looking at people. Like they mattered. Like they could do great things just for wanting.” Arthur tipped his head the other way and graduated to a light buffing of the gold inlay within the hard steel of the sword. Cast me away, it said. Arthur should have done that from the very first he ever saw it. His gentle smile faded, a frond of seaweed wavering into the surf. “He told me he forged it in a dragon’s breath. Or rather, that someone forged it, but I know it was him. No one else would have done something so utterly ridiculous for a king who shunned magic. I wasn’t worthy when he bade me pull it out.” His lips passed from a straightening line and settled into a vague introspection. “I’m not sure I ever was, to anyone but him. He was… He was good. At the end, he was the only good thing I had left.”

Lainey must have finally lost her battle with detachment because she failed to register most of what Arthur said, and breathed, “God, your face.”

Arthur blanked his expression and looked up, startled. “I’m sorry?”

Lainey propped her elbows on the edge of the table and merely watched him for a moment. The standoff grew disquieting very quickly, but Arthur persevered in waiting her out. Eventually, Lainey gave in and hid her mouth behind her hands to explain, “Your face, when you talk about him. I can actually see the way you feel.”

“Well,” Arthur blurted out, clearing his throat. “He is my…” He almost said manservant. Which Merlin hadn’t been for years, even by Arthur’s count. “My, um. Merlin.”

“Your Merlin,” Lainey echoed, teasing. There was sadness in there too, though, and it puzzled Arthur. “You really mean that.”

Hoarse and off kilter, Arthur replied, “It’s hard to explain.”

“No, it’s not.” Lainey took a deep breath and broke the moment by straightening back up in her chair. Once again, she tapped the pads of her fingers on her scry phone, and finally, the filmy water-screen surface went completely dark. She pondered her own fingers for a moment after that, troubled, and then changed the subject by her posture alone. In a small voice, she said, “I spent all last night trying to figure out how he did it – how he made the light and opened my beer. I thought it had to be a trick of some kind, but then he put a broken wine glass back together right in front of me, and I just…” She blew out a heavy breath and shook her head at some great nothing in the air between them. “I still can’t believe that it’s real. I’m sitting here wondering when I’ll be sectioned, honestly. And then it hits me that I won’t be, because I’m not imagining it.”

Though she didn’t ask, Arthur reassured her, “You’re not imagining it, no.” He slid his sword off the table and laid it across his knees, still pondering her odd behavior. “I still can’t understand how that’s so hard for you to believe. Magic is still right in front of you; you just don’t credit it.” He looked up and dragged his coffee mug closer, though he didn’t feel like drinking from it. It was just something to do.

“You didn’t have doubts?” Lainey demanded. “When you found out, you just – what? Kept calm and carried on?”

“God, no.” Arthur snuffed to himself, remembering those first few days after he discovered what Merlin was. It wasn’t the same as what Lainey references, though. “I didn’t find out like this. Magic has been an integral part of my life, for all of my life. I fought it at first, and then later welcomed it. I have seen wonders because of it, and also terrible retributions.” His body tightened at that last comment, and he shifted his hips sideways to dispel the discomfort. “I’ll not lie – I find it frightening more often than not, and much of it, I sometimes wish did not exist. But it would never cross my mind to claim that it is not real.” He gestured to Lainey’s dark scry phone sitting on the table near her elbow. “That thing, for instance. It does not bother or terrify me because we had things like that before: magical means of talking to each other from two separate kingdoms. Or the security feed wards – Merlin put those exact same things around our camps to help keep us safe at night, and warn us if bandits approached. I can still see magic everywhere, my lady. It pains me that you do not recognize it.”

“I’m not completely sure what you’re talking about,” Lainey admitted. She shook her head and turned her scry phone over. “But now that you say it, you do seem less put off by modern technology than I might have expected.”

Arthur shrugged. “I have seen stranger and more terrifying things than this place. Being chased by a dragon tends to render scry phones banal.”

Lainey nodded a few times in apparent agreement, regrouped, and then seemed compelled to ask, “An actual dragon?”

“Yes.” Arthur frowned. “Are they not known either?”

Mostly under her breath, Lainey muttered, “We should save that for another day.”

Arthur made a face at her, and then tried not to dwell on the thought that more than just dragons may be extinct now. Were there still unicorns? Wyverns? Deer and boar?

Thankfully, Gryff interrupted them at that point, and Arthur sat back to try on a friendly smile. Which Gryff regarded with suspicion as he set a scry phone down in front of Arthur. “If I may interrupt, I took the liberty of procuring you a mobile phone of your own, sir.”

Arthur blinked at the thing without touching it, and then at Lainey as he stupidly and belatedly realized that she must have magic since she had one of these scrying devices. Did Leon develop magic too at some point, or did Lainey make use of her powers for Leon to speak through hers on Beltane? Again, he wondered if any of them even realized that they were using magic. That would explain everything, actually – if they no longer understood magic to be the same thing that Arthur meant by the word, then they might have been talking at cross purposes this whole time. Except that Merlin, Leon, and Gryffin came from the same time as Arthur, and would know better. So they must simply be lying. Everyone was lying to everyone else around here, for no discernable purpose, so why not lie about that too?

“Gryffin,” Arthur began, turning back. “You know I can’t use one of these.”

“It will not bite,” Gryff replied, unimpressed. “And I am not assigning you a servant to make use of it on your behalf so that you don’t have to touch one.”

“No, I mean, I can’t,” Arthur stressed. “I can’t use magic.”

Lainey exchanged an odd look with Gryff, who now appeared both sad and perplexed for some indiscernible reason. “Arthur,” Lainey said. “A mobile phone is not magic.”

“Alright, look.” Arthur bit his tongue over the immediate burst of temper that threatened. “I will overlook the insult of thinking me too common or too untrustworthy to speak plainly with, but I have grown tired of trying to believe these lies when my rational mind knows better. You may call it technology if you like, but it is clearly magic. Perimeter warding spells, and the damn lights, for god’s sake.” He jabbed his fingers at the ceiling above them, and the unnatural brightness of the still flames there. “I am not an idiot. That is Merlin’s leeward oats spell. And you trap moments in shiny papers that you put on the walls. And this thing.” Arthur poked the corner of the scry box so that it spun around a few times. “I don’t care that it is not in a bowl. That is a scrying object. Why will no one admit that everyone uses magic, everywhere? It can hardly be a secret when anyone with eyes can look straight at it. Do you all think that I will reject it again?” Arthur took their stunned silence for confirmation and hissed through his teeth. “Do you truly think that I would go back on my word just because magic is no longer confined to use by a scant few? For god’s sake, this is the world I fought for. I wanted this – I wanted good magic in the world!”

The abrupt silence betrayed how Arthur’s attempt to restrain his temper failed. Two kitchen maids were staring from the other side of the kitchen space, and a young man in work clothes stood frozen beneath the old stone lintels of the ancient doorway. Plenty of other staff members littered the space all around them, chewing on leftovers from the breakfast bar or drinking tea and coffee. None of them appeared friendly; they all seemed suspicious, or outright disapproving of Arthur’s presence.

Gryff left the scry phone where it was and stalked to the worktop where a fresh carafe of coffee waited. On his way back toward Arthur, he snapped at the hostile room in general, “Master Merlin will not appreciate anyone interfering with his king.”

A few of the dozen or so gathered men and women nodded, but they remained displeased.

“You all have duties, do you not?” Gryff plunked the coffee pot onto the table and glared at them all from over Arthur’s shoulder. “Unless you have legitimate business here in my kitchen? There are dishes to scrub if you have nothing better to do.”

Several people grumbled at that, but they finally broke up and filed out to attend to other tasks. Arthur let out a breath he hadn’t meant to hold.

“They will come round,” Gryff assured him, picking up the coffee pot again so that he could wipe down the surface of the table beneath it. “As I warned you, the hereditary staff is privy to most secrets here. Magic is a sensitive subject because for much of known history, talk of it may have gotten Master Merlin killed. They can be trusted, but their goodwill must be earned.”

Arthur nodded and watched the door for a while longer, just to be certain no one came back. “Servants always know.” Arthur touched the hilt of his sword just to reassure himself that it was there. Then he processed what Gryff just said. “Recent known history?”

Gryff glanced again at Lainey, speaking at her in silence until they both appeared to come to an accord. “Indeed,” Gryff acknowledged, looking away from her to focus once again on arranging Arthur’s coffee. “There were exceptions, of course, but your father’s campaign bore more fruit than he realized. When the Christian way came to prominence, their efforts to eradicate the old ways put your father’s half-hearted purge to shame. And largely succeeded. The roots of the old religion were gone by then. No one resisted with quite the same vigor as when your father attempted the same thing.”

Lainey blinked at George a few times, glanced in the other direction, and then scribbled something into her notebook.

To say nothing of calling Uther’s purge half-hearted, Arthur shook his head at the other part. “Are you saying that the old religion is gone? That this whole land is a Christian kingdom, as Mercia was?”

“Mercia in your time was barely Christian in anything more than name and insult to their older gods,” Gryff countered. “And no, it is not entirely gone, or else I strongly suspect that Master Merlin would be as well, just as the spirits of the groves are gone. But much of it was finally lost, and cannot be resurrected now. Master Merlin is likely the last person on earth who still practices the way our ancestors did, and even his understanding of the old religion is scarce and imperfect at best.”

Lainey tapped her pencil a few times, puffed up as if to speak, and then apparently thought better of it.

Arthur shook his head. “I don’t understand – magic and the old religion are the same thing. You say that the old religion is gone, or that magic was persecuted again, but I can still see it, Gryffin. All of this is magic – do they not know that?” He shoved the phone box away yet again, disgusted by the idea of it.

Even though she seemed confused by half of this argument, Lainey broke in with, “None of this is magic. I can only imagine what you see when you look at these things, but I swear, it’s not magic.”

“These are machines,” Gryff explained with no inflection aside from the competent tone that a servant was supposed to have. “Sophisticated and specialized, and difficult to make outside of facilities dedicated solely to the creation of parts for them, but still just machines. Like the gears of Antikythera, or a metal rod of harnessed lightning. This phone is not a scrying device.” He picked up the dark little rectangle and placed it back in front of Arthur. “It is not magic. You do not need magic to use it. This is just a machine. It is nothing more magical than a grinding wheel powered by the flow of a river.”

“It is a scrying box!” Arthur shouted. “I’ve seen them before – Merlin helped me use them myself! It is mirror glass and water. Stop lying to me!”

“Touch here,” Gryff instructed, pointing at the surface of the scry glass. When Arthur puffed up his chest in preparation for another yell, he added a gentle, “Please, sire.”

Arthur growled though his teeth and put his finger where indicated. The scrying screen immediately lit up to show swirling colors behind a floating collection of letters and numbers. Arthur’s ire lessened, but he was not certain that he liked this object’s behavior. “What is it doing?” Did Merlin’s little water box look like this when he called Leon from the armory? Arthur couldn’t remember.

“That is a lock screen,” Gryff replied, his tone entirely neutral and instructive. “It keys on the image of your face so that none other may use it. Lean forward, and show it your face.”

“No,” Arthur exclaimed, as if Gryff should have known better than to ask. “Cursed objects use that kind of magic. Are you – ” Arthur stopped speaking like running into a stone wall, and slowed his breathing. “I was right all along; this is a trick. None of this is real; it’s an enchantment.”

Lainey leaned over the table and reached for him, her entire posture conciliatory. “Arthur – ”

Arthur did not give her a chance to finish that, cutting her off by grabbing his sword as he shoved himself away and onto his feet. “Do not come any closer.”

“Sire,” Gryff attempted to sooth him. “No one is enchanted. You have been here for days, now. You know that this is not a trick.”

“Gwaine passed a year of fantastic recollections in a single day once,” Arthur argued, backing slowly away. “Magic is insidious; it is more than capable of this deception. Now tell me how to leave this place.”

In Arthur’s periphery, Lainey skittered in a wide arc to avoid coming too close to him, and ran out of the kitchen. Arthur could only imagine what host of captors she meant to rouse against him now that he was aware of their ruse.

“Put your sword down,” Gryff ordered sharply.

Arthur responded by pointing it at him. “Stay back. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if you force me.”

“You may think what you like of the others,” Gryff snapped, “but you know me. I would never allow my master to remain in the sort of prison you imply.”

Arthur shook his head, and with genuine sorrow, told him, “Not even Merlin is immune to infection by magic, much less you. I know that you would not willingly allow him to come to harm, but George, you are not you right now. You have all been trapped by these phone boxes.”

Gryff narrowed his eyes but did not back down, not even with a sword raised at his chest. “Sire, I realize that many things are confusing to you right now, but how do you think Master Merlin will react if he walks in on you insisting that we are all delusions and enchantments?”

“He will react exactly as I would expect,” Arthur replied gravely. “He will protect his king, at any cost.”

“Yes,” Gryff agreed. “And what of the innocents caught in that? If you are wrong, and you compel him to act, he will hate himself after. More than he already does.”

Arthur’s resolve wavered, but he still insisted, “This is some kind of fae magic; it holds us all in thrall. That is why nothing makes sense, and none of you seem to recognize what magic looks like anymore. It is influencing you to forget – that is what people say about these places, isn’t it? It’s what Leon once told me about – the wild magic. Fairy rings, and glades where the moss grows on the south sides of trees. We have all been trapped here, George. It is stealing our recollections, and soothing us to think that this is normal.”

“My name is Gryffin, and this is not a fae snare.”

“It has to be!” Please, let it be that. Arthur had some hope of escaping and going back where the world made sense, if it were that.

Gryff dared to take a step closer to him, right up to the point of Arthur’s extended sword. “You remember the battlefield you came from, do you not?”

Arthur shook his head and cast a frantic glance around the now empty kitchen. “Yes,” he finally admitted. Like an involuntary spasm, his hand covered the mark on his stomach where the death blow penetrated his flesh.

“Was that a delusion?”

Arthur’s throat spasmed without his consent, and he had to swallow the lump that formed there. “I…no?” Or was it? Merlin always did seem to think that the life they lived after Guinevere was wrong on a fundamental level. What if everything was part of the figment? What if Guinevere was still alive out there, and it was Arthur caught by enchantments?

“You died,” Gryff asserted, unsympathetic but not with malice. “You were dead, sire. We watched you die. We watched the boat take you into the misted waters. You left this world.”

“I…” Arthur’s arm strained with fatigue from holding his sword aloft at a right angle for so long. He stared into a distance that stretched beyond mere space, or the walls of this harsh room. His eyes lost focus as the memory swamped him, dim with dying and the failing of his body while he still inhabited it. He could smell mint and pine. Juniper, as well. Chamomile and herbs. Yarrow. It was soothing. It smelled just like Merlin. His infirmary. Close and warm. It felt like peasant stew to sooth a hungry stomach, and Merlin fussing over him, smiling and griping but still glad to serve him. To love him. It felt like coming home, safe.

“This is not a curse, or an enchantment,” Gryff said, his voice intense and forceful with his conviction. “At worst, this might be Avalon itself, but even if you are dead among the apples, this is still real. There is no escape, and there is nothing to go back to. If you cannot accept that, you will never find peace.”

“No,” Arthur breathed. He felt his nose clog and fought it, for it gave too much of him away. “No, if this were the afterworld, then Guinevere would be here.” He tried not to recall any more of his last moments, but they were a floodgate previously held back by his own shock, and the trauma of waking here to crawl out of a muddy lake bed that had died as long ago as Arthur likely had. Water slapped the sides of the boat, calm. Soothing. Guinevere squeezed his fingers between her hands and tried to smile through the shine of water spilling down her cheeks. “Why is she not here – ”

“Because this is not Avalon,” Merlin said. His voice and his presence broke over the room like cool waters. “And even if it were, she would not be there.”

“What…” Arthur breathed as if his lungs could not recognize what he inhaled as air.

“Arthur, you saw her at the cauldron. She is Other, now.”

Arthur shook his head, his chest quaking. “No.” But he couldn’t forget how Merlin reacted to the vision of Guinevere at the Cauldron of Arianrhod: with sorrow for what he did to her, as if saving her made her into something awful. But Gaius said that she wasn’t in the dark anymore, so she had to be here. Or there, in Avalon, if that wasn’t where he was now.

Merlin stepped out from beneath the lintel to the dark stone corridor and pale, perfect white light bathed his features once he left the shadows. “I wish I could apologize, but she would not want me to. She lives, after a fashion. And in brightness. It is better than the abyss she might have had. But she won’t be waiting for you in Avalon. That path is closed to her now.” Merlin paced carefully up to him, swaying with each step, until he reached Arthur’s shoulder. “Enough, Arthur.” He covered Arthur’s fist with his fingers and then effortlessly pulled the sword free from Arthur’s hand. “I know that it is difficult, but this is real. And I am sorry to have to tell you that; I wish it weren’t. I wish this were Avalon; it would be easier. But it’s not. We still have to live a while longer.” He leaned past Arthur and set Excalibur on the breakfast table, his boot striking the book full of the lies that comprised the world’s mangled memory of Arthur’s life. “How can I prove that this real?” Merlin asked.

Helpless, Arthur looked around to find that Leon had also appeared, but he held back, his face set and unyielding. Lainey stood small in his shadow, biting her thumb. She probably thought this her fault for letting him see that book. For showing him all of the wrongness of this world, and its deficient memory, and inducing him to see through the illusory veneer. “I don’t know,” Arthur confessed. “I can’t tell.” He gulped in his next breath and swallowed it when his lungs refused to accept it.

Merlin nodded and touched Arthur’s bicep for the sole purpose, evidently, of running his palm over the shape of Arthur’s arm. “I’m real, though?”

“Of course, you’re real,” Arthur scoffed. He ignored the threat of moistness lingering within the syllables he spoke, and the tightness in his chest as he grabbed at himself. Merlin used to do that, he remembered. He used to gouge at his sternum when he couldn’t breathe right. “I would know you anywhere.”

Merlin smiled and met his eyes, his fingers dallying near the exposed skin of Arthur’s wrist. “Then would it really matter if it’s a veil dream? One you’re having with me?”

Arthur choked down the abrupt grief engendered by that innocent question. “It would mean you followed me.”

“Yes,” Merlin nodded. He inflected the word as if he meant to follow it with something more, and for no discernable reason, didn’t.

Arthur gasped at him a few times, caught in the simple pull of Merlin’s calm gaze.

“You need to breathe, Arthur.” Merlin played his fingers against Arthur’s and then gripped them to stop him hurting himself with how violently he dug his nails into his own chest. “You’re panicking. There’s nothing here to panic over.”

Short of breath now, Arthur warbled, “You don’t know that.”

“I do know that. We are safe here, Arthur. I’ve made sure of it.” Merlin ducked his head to recapture Arthur’s stuttering gaze and lifted his eyebrows, his face an infinite kindness tinged with innocent mischief like he knew things no one else could. Like it was when he first told Arthur to pull a magical sword of lies from a random nothing stone in the forest. “Trust me. Arthur,” Merlin coaxed, squeezing Arthur’s fingers. “You have to face this.”

Finally, Arthur admitted aloud the thought that had been percolating in the back of his mind ever since he clawed himself from the once watery ground. A shameful, desperate, small thing that rang in Arthur’s ears like the petulant whine of a child afraid to blow out the candles and sleep in the dark. “I don’t want this to be real. I want to go home.”

“So do I,” Merlin breathed, his eyes filming over like the liquid surface of his scry phone screen. He breathed in through his mouth when snuffling did not gain him any air. Then he shook his head and tried to keep smiling as his eyes bled wet like the sea beneath a shattered blue sky, bright and clear from the pain of drowning. “And we never can.”

Arthur squeezed his eyes shut, bottom lip bitten at the effort of maintaining his façade of masculinity and strength. He was a king, dammit. He was a bloody king. No man was worth his tears, but even if one were (Merlin, only Merlin), it would not be himself he spent them on. “I don’t – ” Arthur breathed quick and shallow for a moment. This was overwhelming, this – everything that happened in the past few days, everything they told him, everything he put off thinking about or reacting to, or considering beyond the single bare moment that he could handle – it crashed down around him like a defensive wall giving way to siege, or a hoard of men pouring over a splintered wooden battlement defended by one lone, forgotten man with a gleaming sword. “I can’t do this.”

Merlin’s fingers squeezed tight at Arthur’s arm and he nodded. He did not argue, or offer reassurance; he simply acknowledged what Arthur felt in that moment.

“I can’t…” Arthur gasped. His knees buckled and he grabbed at Merlin as he sank to the floor – his only anchor. The only thing that always stayed true, no matter how unsteady a port he was. Merlin was always there. Always there, faltering in himself but never wavering where it came to what he gave Arthur. Staid and true, and damaged because where Merlin had never gone anywhere – never left him – Arthur had. Arthur left. He left, and now he had to kneel here knowing that he left and could never set it right, and still. Still, Merlin was right there. Not angry. Not blaming him. Just always there to be leant upon when Arthur needed someone more than himself to get by.

Merlin’s hand ended up in Arthur’s hair, and it was a strange tableau that Arthur performed for him – kneeling at Merlin’s feet the way that Merlin once kneeled at his. Clinging to Merlin’s calves to make sure that he stayed where Arthur needed him. Like a pillar holding up Arthur’s world – Altas with all the earth perched precariously on his shoulders, bruised to the bone but bent tall so that the weight he bore did not crush Arthur beneath his breast. Shielding him. Protecting him from the unmanageable ordeal of being himself.

Eventually, Arthur cried himself sick and empty, and breathed out the low keen of mourning that he had not yet allowed himself. His world was gone. One way or another, this was all he had now. He smothered that knowledge into Merlin’s thigh because if he didn’t, the wail would not cease, and he would crack the ground beneath them with the volume of his loss.

In the midst of it, Arthur barely registered Merlin ordering everyone out, but he wasn’t sure if they all left or not. It was a small mercy that by the time he dared to look up and gauge the level of embarrassment to which he had subjected himself, no one remained apart from the two of them. Arthur roused himself, limbs heavy like waterlogged tree branches, and tried to meet Merlin’s eyes. He couldn’t quite lift his head that far, though. In truth, he didn’t even want to. And that scared him more than breaking down, or being trapped in a world that didn’t make sense anymore.

Merlin slid down to kneel before him on the cold floor. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Arthur shook his head. “If I’m dead now…” He felt dull all over. Tarnished brass, and rusted armor disintegrating right off of his person. “If this is a veil dream, you better not have followed me. When you said you tried, and failed, that better have been true, so help me god, Merlin.”

“Those attempts are my happiest failures,” Merlin averred. “We are not dead, Arthur. Not anymore.”

Some part of Arthur tried to sharpen at that, and snap, but when he spoke, the words persisted in running together at both ends. “That implies that you were dead too at some point.”

“Yes, it does.” Merlin did not clarify further. Hands gripped Arthur’s and folded tight over his numb fingers. “Do you remember what you told me once about battle fatigue?”

“I’m not fatigued of battle,” Arthur slurred dumbly. It should concern him, his loss of motor skills. “All I know is battle.”

“That’s my point,” Merlin replied gently. It still cut, that tone. Infinite and soft. Forgiving Arthur for being just a man, and nothing more. Embracing him for it. “Maybe nobody else is paying attention, but I am. Yeah? I know you’re not doing as well as you want us to think. And there’s no shame here for it.” He shifted as if quoting, now – an orator performing rehearsed lines repeated so often that they were ingrained in his soul. “Sometimes it’s harder after you’re done fighting – after you can let down your guard. And sometimes, that’s more terrifying than war.”

Arthur shook his head and let his eyes shut of their own accord. Gods, but he was so tired. “I said that to you.”

“Yeah,” Merlin agreed simply. He was still holding Arthur’s fingers hostage in his grasp, which was the only way Arthur could tell that Merlin was upset too. His palms were clammy. “Not all of your advice is thick.”

It felt wrong to laugh, but Arthur did it anyway, short and sharp as a physician’s blade. He whined afterward, though he wasn’t sure why. Maybe it hurt, and he couldn’t feel it.

“Listen to me,” Merlin breathed. “I know that I am a poor substitute for everything that is gone, but I am here. I’m here. And I’m not leaving. I will be here at your side, like I always am. Remember? You are not alone.”

With hardly any breath to back the words, Arthur mimicked, “Poor substitute.” Before Merlin could take that as some kind of put-down, he said again, this time with incredulity, “Poor substitute?” Arthur looked up and met his gaze. “You still think that I consider you a poor substitute?”

Merlin licked his lips and shook his head, definitive. But he followed that with, “I’m not a replacement for anyone else. I can’t give you back any of what you’ve lost.”

Stupid man – those two statements should not go together like that, as if one logically followed the other. They had nothing to do with each other. Arthur slipped his hands free and reached up to grab Merlin’s face – too roughly perhaps, but the point needed to be made that Arthur regarded this seriously. “You are not a substitute for something I’ve lost. You are the only thing I have left that I cannot bear to lose.” Pleading and desperate, he implored, “Why can’t you understand that? Why have you never been able to understand that?”

Merlin kept on smiling, lopsided and wry as he ringed his fingers around Arthur’s wrists so that he could pull his hands off. There wasn’t any kind of secret mirth in that smile; instead, it resembled the sharing of unspoken truths. Or maybe just quiet acceptance. All Arthur saw, though, was self-deprecation masquerading as fondness. With infinite grace, Merlin assured him, “You don’t have to convince me of anything.”

But he did, and he couldn’t. Arthur just stared at him, entirely at a loss, and allowed Merlin to hold his hands down by the wrists so that he couldn’t grasp after some other part of Merlin to shake and dig at with his fingernails to make his point. It never worked anyway – Merlin never actually understood him, or believed him. Arthur didn’t know why this concept was so foreign that Merlin didn’t even have the capacity to take offense at the ideas behind his rejection of what Arthur repeatedly tried to tell him. Unable to think of anything better – some more effective rebuttal, or a new and compelling argument – Arthur merely whispered, like a plea for absolution in a hallowed deathbed confession he could never take back, “You are a wonder.” A precious, impossible wonder.

All Merlin did was quirk one side of his mouth as if Arthur were being quaint, or saying silly things he didn’t mean. “Why don’t we spend a few days camping. You like camping. That hasn’t changed much – we can take the horses, and spend some time in the woods. You can even shoot something. I have your old crossbow around here someplace. No one will know if we poach a couple of rabbits. And maybe you’ll feel better after; killing small fuzzy things always made you happy.”

Arthur shook his head and shut his eyes to hide the expression he could feel rising in his chest like bile. Before Merlin could express any further concern, Arthur nodded. “Yes,” he managed to croak, his voice mostly normal. “Yes, let’s do that.” It would never be how it was, but if accepting a camping invitation made Merlin think that he had cheered Arthur up, then Arthur would fake happiness until he was blue in the face. “Camping…a hunt…I’d like that.”

Merlin murmured a wordless affirmation, pleased, and while Arthur’s eyes were still closed, he pet his fingers tenderly over Arthur’s hair. It was an odd gesture. Uncertain. He seemed to be copying it from the one that Arthur so often used when he searched for a glimpse of the scar at Merlin’s temple, except that for Merlin, any memory he had of Arthur doing that would have been ancient and weathered like a petroglyph carved into bluestone. Maybe that was why it fell so clumsy. “You’ll be alright, Arthur.”

Unable to stop himself, Arthur asked, “Will you ever be?”

“Stop worrying,” Merlin replied. It wasn’t an answer, which told Arthur everything he needed to know. Merlin shuffled back and Arthur opened his eyes to watch him stand, and then to look up the length of him poised above. A tall, thin man with kind, ancient eyes in a shadowed, weary, unnaturally young face. “Come on,” Merlin prompted. He held out an open hand. “The staff will be glad to have us out of their hair; they can prepare for Saturday in peace.”

Arthur’s eyes tracked the length of Merlin’s extended arm until they found the palm of his hand cupped there like it might be holding something other than hope of another’s hand placed into it. Arthur sucked in a resigned breath and grasped Merlin’s forearm to help lever himself back to his feet. He felt empty, and…and precarious. His balance, his mind, everything – it was all wobbly, and it threatened to tip him off the edge of some plateau he blindly stood upon, desperately trying not to move enough to upset the ground beneath his shifting weight. They were not quite at eye level; Merlin was still that bare inch taller than him – of course, he was. He would always be just a little bit above Arthur. “Why do I matter so much to you?” Arthur asked. “You could have anything; why do you still only want me?”

Merlin’s features softened, as if his face unfocused itself while Arthur’s eyes kept struggling to render him sharp. “Because you’re my king?”

“Is that a question?”

“Yes.” Merlin smiled, sweet with the sorrow of ages that Arthur had not seen. “I’ve earned this, Arthur. After all this time, I deserve to have you. The world owes me that.”

Arthur ticked his head to the side, confused. It was not an explanation that Arthur expected, but Merlin said it with such conviction that it must have meant something akin to what Arthur felt when he told himself that surely, the world owed him some peace for all of the horrible things he did with a sword in its name. Payment for the dim and misunderstood fate he could not escape. “I’m your reward?” He wasn’t sure if he found that offensive or touching. Or worse, tragic. It was probably the latter.

“Perhaps,” Merlin replied, his lips upturned while the rest of the crinkly laugh lines smoothed over again. “Not that I want to feed your ego even more, calling you a prize.” He poked Arthur’s chest and traced a few letters printed on his tunic. “If we weren’t these people, you said once.” He shrugged. “Well, now, we’re not. What will you do with that, Arthur? What choice will you make for your life, now that you are free to have one?”

What is your choice, Arthur Pendragon?

Arthur blinked, and swallowed bile. “I don’t know. It was never something I could have, so I never let myself think about.”

Merlin nodded as if he understood exactly how that felt. He probably did. Hadn’t he said as much once? “Think about it now, then,” Merlin enjoined. “For however long you need.”

“And you’ll wait for that?” Arthur asked in spite of himself. “You’ll just keep waiting for me to get myself in hand, even if once I do, I decide to leave?”

“Yes.” Merlin grinned at that – secret smiles and closeness, and all the things that he lost in those last months before Arthur’s final battlefield called. Leaning close, Merlin confided, “But I’m not worried.” He tapped a finger to the side of his own nose and grinned, cheeky like a daft loon. “I See you now.”

Arthur canted his head to one side and looked into that beloved face imparting wisdom as if he didn’t regularly trip over Arthur’s chamber pot and put new holes in perfectly good socks because he was pants at mending them. Arthur nodded and reached up to feather his fingertips through the hair above Merlin’s ear, parting the dark strands so that he could see the thready white line of the scar that his own inattention and lack of care put there. “If this place allows it, then, will you let me say it?”

Merlin’s eyebrows shifted into straight lines of confusion. “Say what?”

“The thing you never let me say before.” Arthur was aware of the scrutiny laid upon him, shining bright from the painfully blue eyes before him, but he did not meet it. He kept his own gaze on his fingers, and the tufts of hair that he sifted between them. “That you never wanted to hear.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Merlin told him. “You always spoke your mind.” He cracked an uncertain grin. “Being the king and all.”

The humor fell flat between them; they were rusty after all. Arthur finally looked Merlin in the eye, and the lack of comprehension brought a wet sheen to his own. How much, he wondered once again, did Merlin forget over the intervening years? How much of the nuance between them was gone? The silent knowledge, the unspoken understandings – how much of that was just an echo that Merlin mistook for unprompted impulse?

Merlin switched to grave but teasing in the next instant. “Although it could’ve just been that you’re a prat. Hard to tell.”

Since it was a simple thing, however unwieldy and terrifying, Arthur merely countered with, “I love you.”

A complicated flutter of tics washed over Merlin’s face, all of them indicative of emotions that Arthur could not easily read anymore on his unchanged features. Merlin drew in a shallow breath as he lowered his gaze to where his fingers automatically picked at the place on Arthur’s chest where his tunic once bore laces crossed at his collarbone. His hand stilled there, and he blinked at it a few times, perhaps remembering that he used to do that absently as an excuse to touch – fuss at Arthur’s appearance as a manservant must, to cover the impulse to touch in fondness, since touching his betters outside of service was something he was not allowed to do. Or perhaps he was just confused by it, and unaware of how he mimicked himself in ticks and habits of disconnected muscle memory floating along the river of years to wash up here, against the fabric and skin that covered Arthur’s beating heart.

Merlin opened his mouth, lips sticky with a lack of moisture, and then stalled over an apparent dearth of words.

Arthur nodded and let himself feel the sting of Merlin’s silence. It wasn’t his fault. Too much time had passed Merlin by for it to still be there, as it once was. “It’s alright,” Arthur told him. He cupped Merlin’s skull in his hands as if cradling a precious thing between them, and pet his thumbs over the hinges of Merlin’s jaw. “You don’t have to say it back if it’s not there the same way anymore.”

“It’s there,” Merlin whispered back, with no hesitation whatsoever. “In some form. But you’re not saying that to me; you’re saying it to the boy you knew before. And he’s gone.”

“No, he’s not.” Arthur pressed his lips over the sharp jut of Merlin’s cheekbone. “He’s still here. I can see him.”

“You can’t,” Merlin argued. “I can’t.”

“You’re an idiot, so what you think doesn’t count right now.”

Merlin snorted at the attempt at levity even though it didn’t seem to lessen whatever concern he had. “I was right; you’re just a prat.”

“Always,” Arthur assured him. He took that opportunity to step back, though he swiped his thumb once more over Merlin’s cheek to wipe away the moisture from his own lips before letting go all together. “I don’t know if I will ever be able to look at this place without fearing that it is not real, or that some part of me has gone mad to pretend that it is.”

“That’s okay,” Merlin rushed to reassure him. “I do that too. Everyone knows it. I’m just a little bit mad some days.”

“Mad king Arthur and his mad sorcerer,” Arthur agreed. He offered a pained smile even as he recognized nothing funny in the thought now.

Merlin grinned, however, and seemed to find it properly amusing. The corners of his eyes crinkled with the sentiment. “So, em. Camping, then. Yeah. Just the two of us. And we can act like it’s still Camelot. I’ll lay wards, and pretend you don’t know I’m starting the cook fire with magic.”

Arthur finally offered him a true smile. “After the display I just put on, do you think that any of your overprotective staff will let you ride off alone with me?”

“If they try to follow, I’ll raise a fog like pea soup.” Merlin grabbed Arthur’s sword from the table, snagged Arthur momentarily by the sleeve of his tunic, and then plucked the fabric over Arthur’s chest to indicate that he wanted Arthur to follow him.

All of that was new. The whole series of touches was something Arthur couldn’t recall Merlin ever directing at him before. As Leon pointed out last night, though, Merlin wouldn’t have dared act that way in Camelot. It likely never even crossed his mind that in another life, he might have touched Arthur like that – casually, just to feel him against his fingertips.

Oblivious to Arthur’s thoughts, Merlin kept talking as he led the way with Arthur in tow. “But I’m not packing for you this time. See how well you can manage without a servant to remember everything you need.”

“At least if I’m packing my own things, I’ll know I have clean socks.” Arthur followed a few steps behind, ducking under the misplaced lintel into the narrow stone corridor that led through to the main house. “And if I do forget something, I’ll just steal yours. You’ve been liberal enough with my things over the years; let’s see how you like it.” He followed Merlin’s thin shape back into the light, and then ran into a wall of people staring from the room right on the other side of it. “Um. Hi.”

Merlin rolled his eyes at all of them and shooed them out of his way. “Gryff told you lot to buzz off. Everything is fine. Arthur’s fine, I’m fine, put away the pitch forks and get out.”

Arthur thought that last comment was some sort of joke until he noticed a few field workers loitering outside the open windows with actual pitch forks. He offered them a twitchy smile, and they all glared back in unison. At the far end of the room, Leon waited with his arms crossed and a glower marring his face. Lainey leaned against the wall behind him, uneasy yet more collected than any of them, while Gryff betrayed his nerves in the frantic and hyper-focused feather dusting of a single, sparkling, dustless vase.

Merlin hooked his thumb over his shoulder at the shuffling parade of people resentfully dispersing out through various doors and tall glass windows, and asked Leon, “Why didn’t you clear them out?”

“Because I approve of their sentiment,” Leon chirped with false ease. He paused, waiting for everyone else to file out of earshot but overlooking Gryff’s presence in the corner altogether. “They could have heard something they shouldn’t, Merlin.” Leon stepped closer and lowered his voice so that only Merlin and Arthur could hear him. “Their loyalty cannot protect you, old friend. The truth is dangerous. They would never understand, or accept it.”

Arthur wanted so badly to tell him that his secrets were a joke, and that at least half the staff was running around on a daily basis making up for Leon’s and Merlin’s shortcomings in the secret-keeping department, but he graciously held his tongue.

As if to challenge Arthur’s equanimity on that point, Leon turned to him next and dropped the friendly façade. “And you. I don’t care who you are, or what Merlin says. If you pull a sword on someone again in this house, I will have you out.”

“Leon,” Merlin interjected sternly. “That’s enough. He’s doing the best he can.”

“No!” Leon snapped back. “This situation affects me too – it affects Lainey. If he goes off half-cocked one day because he doesn’t want to face reality, all of us will suffer.”

“No one is suffering,” Merlin scoffed. “We’re fine.”

Leon huffed and shook his head and declared, “I won’t have this violence in our home.”

Merlin balked. “He is not violent!”

“This is the second time in as many days that he’s pulled a sword on you – ”

“Technically, he pulled it on Gryff this time.”

“Technically, he pulled it on Elaine!”

“Merlin.” Arthur rested what he hoped was a calming hand on Merlin’s shoulder. “I did pull my sword. Leon is only looking out for his house.”

Merlin tutted at that. “Leon is overreacting, as usual. And he needs to find a better outlet for assuaging his misplaced guilt than trying to control me.”

“That’s not what he’s doing,” Lainey stepped in. “Merlin, we both love you. We’re just worried.” A beat too late, she added, “And we love Arthur, too. Or we will, eventually, I’m sure. It’s just…it’s…” She made a nonspecific gesture and then used her index finger to stab Leon in the back of the shoulder as if it were a sword. “No offense, Arthur.”

Unimpressed, Merlin asked, “What do you think he’ll do? Stab me in my sleep?”

“No,” Lainey promised. “It’s just the general lack of impulse control with a sharp object.”

Merlin turned back to Leon and demanded, “Is it?”

Leon bit his lip as if he did not want to answer honestly, but Merlin was standing there with obvious intent to hound Leon until he got the explanation and capitulation that he wanted. Rather than answer, though, Leon turned and ordered, “Gryffin, leave us.”

Gryff stopped dusting and narrowed his eyes over the top of the pristine vase before silently traversing the perimeter of the room into the corridor that led back to the kitchen. Only Arthur noticed how he ducked sideways into a niche that the shadows and the construction of the stone wall otherwise concealed.

After stalking over to slam the door shut, Leon rounded on Merlin. “Old friend,” Leon prefaced, both hostile and deeply concerned. “What I think is that being around his old habits will make you forget yourself at the wrong time, and the last thing I want is to see you get sectioned again.”

Merlin’s face went entirely blank, like a freshly melted and cast wax slate. “Forget myself. Right, forgive me, but I suspect what you really mean is act like myself. Like who I actually am.”

“Which is not good for you,” Leon insisted.

Behind him, Lainey rolled her eyes sideways and muttered, “Leon, love, you’re fucking this up. Technically, Arthur could get sectioned too. We're worried about both of them, remember?”

Arthur’s gaze darted between the other three people in the room, well aware that Gryffin was likely listening from the other side of the door. “What does it mean, sectioned? What are you threatening to do?”

“He is threatening to have me locked up as a madman,” Merlin bit back. “Since he has that right, legally.”

Arthur frowned at Leon, mainly because he caught the again part.

“Yes, I do have that right,” Leon hissed, though the emotion behind it was not easy to parse. “A right that you gave me, for your protection.”

Merlin hummed in resentful agreement. “My mistake, then. Go fuck yourself, Leon.”

“I would never do it,” Leon insisted, exasperated. “But I can’t speak for others – you bloody well know that. Or for all of the people not sworn to this place who might encounter you in a state. You know what you’re like.”

“No,” Merlin snapped back. “What I know is that you don’t like the reminder of what I am. And as long as I play the part of your boring old batty brother, you can pretend that you’re normal too.”

“That is not what this is,” Leon exhorted. “I miss seeing you in your natural element, but I have to think rationally about this – about us, and our safety, and our ability to keep living here.”

“Oh, I’m irrational now?”

“You refuse to understand that there is no place left in this world for what any of us really are! When will you learn that you have to at least pretend to be normal?”

“Leon!” Lainey snapped.

“Oh, normal,” Merlin agreed, which didn’t bode well. He looked cuddly and affable, but every word came out clipped. “Yes, define normal for me, Sir Leon.”

Leon groaned at the ceiling. “Don’t make this into a thing. You know what I mean.”

“No, really, I don’t,” Merlin replied. His voice still sounded friendly, but his body language belied that. “Tell me what is so dangerously abnormal about me. Please.”

“Stop being difficult!” Leon snapped. “What will happen to us if you go off the deep end – do you even consider that? You are not his Merlin anymore – you are the lord of this manor.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“Guys, come one,” Lainey wheedled. “This isn’t helping.”

“Merlin, I watched you taste test his food for poison this morning.”

Lainey shook her head. “Hey, no – cut the shit.”

Perplexed, Merlin asked, “Where is this coming from? I thought you were happy he came back.”

Ignoring Lainey’s protest, Leon took a step forward and implored Merlin to understand, “I am happy he’s here, and as long as it is only us, I am happy for us all to indulge ourselves to our hearts’ content. But we cannot just fall back into old habits as if the world outside no longer exists. We live in a fishbowl, Merlin. You have got to remember that even in this house, you are not always safe. There is always someone listening.”

Merlin flared his nostrils and shook his head aside. “You’re being paranoid.”

“The way you act with him, the way he makes you behave – we both know you can’t help yourself, and that isn’t good for you. He isn’t good for you.”

Arthur narrowed his eyes, offended, but the statement merely rubbed at the raw parts of him that his breakdown in the kitchen exposed. What if Leon was right? Look what Arthur’s presence did to Merlin the last time. Arthur had figured out a long time ago that something about his very existence was damaging to Merlin’s.

“Leon,” Lainey warned. "We talked about this. It's Arthur's safety we need to worry about right now." No one acknowledged her but Arthur, though he wasn't sure what danger she might see that he didn't. 

To his credit, Merlin didn’t flinch. He also wrinkled his nose at Leon as if he were a glob of bog muck he had scraped from the bottom of his boot. “You have spent centuries trying to convince me to hate him.”

“No, I haven’t,” Leon denied, baring his teeth. “Don’t twist things – ”

“Maybe it’s you who isn’t good for me,” Merlin suggested. “I mean, what exactly have you ever done that was truly to my benefit?”

Lainey pushed off of the doorjamb and stepped physically between them. “No. Both of you, knock it off.”

Around Lainey’s person, Leon spit back, “I saved your life.”

“Says who?” Merlin demanded. “I was fine where I was; you just didn’t like it.”

“You were not fine!”

In an effort to defuse this situation, Arthur held his hands up and stepped to stand in both of their peripheries. “Why don’t we all just calm down. Merlin, I know that Leon is only worried for you – it’s what he does. And I did point a sword at his lady, so of course, he is angry with me as well. But we can solve this like civilized men, yes? As a matter of honor?”

“No duals,” Lainey interjected, hushed in a similar tactic as Arthur to distract and deescalate. “That’s not civilized anymore.”

“Right,” Arthur readily agreed. “Then I’m sure there is some other civilized activity that this time finds acceptable. We can engage in that. Yes? Arm wrestling perhaps. Or a round of fisticuffs.”

“That’s still dueling,” Lainey informed him.

Arthur made a face at her to demand to know what other methods existed for settling honor disputes.

Leon may not have heard either of them; he was too busy glaring at Merlin as if trying to drill his point and his concern into Merlin’s skull by sheer force of his thoughts alone. “I’m the one who saw what he left of you the first time around. Do you think I want to see it again?”

Involuntarily, Arthur flinched. Worse, Lainey noticed and made a consoling gesture that he had to avoid.

“Arthur is not to blame for any of that,” Merlin snapped. “And you fucking know it. What’s the real problem? Are you pissed off I’m not your charming little senile lap dog anymore?”

“Stop acting as if I am the unreasonable one!” Leon barked. “You forget that I know you. I know what it looks like when your sanity wobbles – worse, I know what follows.”

“That is not what you really fear,” Merlin countered, chillingly calm while Leon tried to find a riposte to justify the rage he could not loose without a suitable target starting the fight for him. Which Merlin probably knew. It was likely why he chose ice as his affect just then. Except that when Arthur looked at him, he didn’t see ice. He saw that other one in Merlin’s face. He saw that part of him that they both once labeled Emrys so that they could pretend that it wasn’t actually a part of good, gentle Merlin at all. “You have built an age of lives around watching me, and Arthur threatens to take that away. The only thing truly bothering you now is that you might have to face sitting in a room with no one but yourself for company, and you are terrified to think of what you might learn.”

Leon took a breath in what looked like a futile effort to calm himself. “This has nothing to do with me.”

Merlin blew air through his teeth in disgust. “Cowardice looks ugly on you.”

“Please,” Lainey begged softly. “Please don’t fight.”

“Everyone, stop!” Arthur shouted. The volume of his voice surprised even him, but it broke the standoff that seemed to have locked Merlin’s and Leon’s focus onto each other. “Listening to you snipe like this, I would swear you don’t even like each other.” Arthur looked at Leon first because Leon was a man who made sense to Arthur. “You need to do something about this anger, Leon. It may be easier than what lies beneath, but it is not healthy. The Leon I knew would never hide his fear inside of rage so that he could escape facing it. Say what you really mean, or shut up.”

Leon regrouped, nostrils flaring with the breath he took, beard bristling around the curl of his lips. “The Leon you knew, sire, died when you did.” He tried to glare at Merlin next, but the sneer would not hold. In a moment of naked honesty, he said, “Arthur is my king, and I love him. But I made promises too.”

Merlin scoffed. “I’m happy to release you from any vows you made to me.”

“I’m not talking about those,” Leon snapped. “I’m talking about the ones I made to him.” He pointed at Arthur and then dropped his arm like a length of lead.

Merlin blinked and visibly regrouped, glancing at Arthur to confirm that yes, Arthur knew what Leon meant.

Pressing his advantage, Leon asserted, “I will not see him use and ruin you a second time.”

“A second time?” Merlin chuffed humorlessly through his teeth. “Arthur didn’t do anything to me the first time round; he’s hardly going to turn on me now.”

Relenting, though not by much, Leon said, “Fine. But think of what he looked like in the kitchen a moment ago. Do you think it safe for him to slip like that in public? Do you think you can stop someone doing to him what was done to you?"

Merlin sucked his lips against his teeth and ducked a glance in Arthur's direction. He offered Arthur barely enough eye contact to notice, and then faced Leon again. "I will look after him. No harm will come to him."

The only reason Leon didn't roll his eyes was that he shut them first. As sharp as his next statement was, he at least sounded reluctant to utter it. "Merlin, you can't even look after yourself."

“Oh, fuck you.” Merlin scoffed and turned to stalk away, but all of his over-large lazing-about chairs were in the way. “And since you seem so bent on infantilizing me, I’ll just point out that I haven’t forgotten nearly as much as you seem to think.”

“I’m not infantilizing you,” Leon protested. “I am trying to protect you.”

“Like you were at Camlann?” Merlin asked, his voice quiet and casual. This could have been any other inconsequential conversation were it not for the flint glinting in his eyes.

Leon’s eyelids fluttered as he started to blink, and resisted. He looked like he stopped breathing, and his skin turned white as a sheet. “Don’t bring that up,” he breathed at Merlin. “That is not an arrow for you to shoot at me to win an argument.”

“It is when you try to pin your own guilt on him.” Merlin looked Leon over once from head to foot and then dismissed the sight of him entirely. “We’ll be gone a few nights. Don’t follow us. Come on, Arthur.” Then louder, he shouted, “Gryffin!”

Leon started after him, leaving Arthur behind to dodge the opening door to the stone passageway. Gryff shot Arthur a concerned look, and then hurried to catch up to Merlin.

“Merlin,” Leon called, unintentionally blocking Gryff from going after Merlin. “This is not finished.”

“It is if I say it is. I outrank you, remember?”

Arthur glanced at his companions. “Do they fight like this often, or should someone intervene?”

Lainey sighed and washed her hands of it with a gesture. Gryff merely seemed generically perturbed.

Halfway into the corridor now, Leon yelled, “I won’t just let you run off into the woods with some imagined version of your king!”

Lainey shook her head and dragged Leon back by his arm to hiss, “You are being a dick, Leon.”

Beyond the doorway, Merlin paused, his back facing them, and Arthur saw his hands curl into fists. With frightening calm, Merlin said, “I’m not imagining him, though.” As if unable to truly trust that, though, he followed it with, “Am I?”

“Not this time,” Leon bit back.

Merlin twisted to look at Leon over his shoulder. “I was right. You realize that? This whole time, I was right. Maybe you’re the snake in the grass, Leon. All these years, telling me I’ve gone mad, or that I’m soft in the head for thinking he’d come back? Convincing me I would never see him again, convincing me to stop hoping? They were lies. Your lies.”

Leon made a face at that, but it wasn’t anger anymore. It was something else, ugly and amorphous. “How could we have known he might actually come back? Tell me honestly – how could anyone be expected to believe something so extraordinary?”

“I knew,” Merlin pointed out, his entire demeanor frosty. “I believed it.” He straightened and curved his body in open mockery. “Oh, but I’m just the madman, right? Why should anything I think count?”

Leon sighed and slipped his eyes closed. “Merlin, old friend…”

“Why do you call me that?” Merlin demanded.

Defeated, Leon replied, “Because it’s true.”

“Then act like it.” Merlin shook his head and looked down. He seemed unsure of what to say next, and his eyes flickered to Arthur’s as if he regretted that this conversation took place in front of witnesses. Merlin sighed eventually, his posture shifting. He didn’t shrink, but that preternatural presence he sometimes exuded faded away, perhaps drawn out the windows by the breeze there. The effect was that Merlin took up no more space than any other ordinary man, which only became apparent after he drained the room of whatever else made up his intangible aspects. Not the magic – something else. Something that did not really belong in this world of walls and men. He might not even know he did things like that. Merlin could be remarkably dense, especially about himself. He shook his head and faced Leon properly, though he ventured no closer. “Leon,” he implored softly. “You can’t keep doing this.”

Arthur glanced at Lainey for some kind of explanation of what this was, but she was busy feigning deafness now.

“Doing what?” Leon croaked. He smeared his hand over his face and then held it out as if to show the literal sweat off his brow. “I’ve given my life to you.”

Over near the wall, Lainey crossed her arms protectively over her stomach and pressed her lips tight, eyes resolutely trained down.

For his part, Merlin merely looked disappointed. He shook his head a few times, then just wandered down the corridor and away from the whole conversation.

When Merlin’s footsteps finally faded away, Leon slumped where he stood and sighed, “Fuck.”

“You did that to yourself,” Lainey told him, though she sounded sympathetic.

“I know,” Leon mumbled. “I have issues.” He turned around and seemed startled to find Arthur still standing there. “Sire.”

Arthur glanced at the empty doorway, and then back to Leon. “I won’t pretend to know what that was really about, but I’m sure he didn’t intend insult.”

Leon wrinkled his nose, but hid the rest of his burgeoning expression by turning his face aside. “With respect, sire, you don’t know him anymore.”

“That’s probably true,” Arthur allowed. “In some ways.” He cleared his throat and set his hand on his belt, only to realize that Merlin took his sword with him when he left the room. “If you are genuinely concerned, I’ll convince him that I don’t want to go on a hunt.”

“No,” Leon sighed. “No, it’s… He wants to take you. I’ve no valid reason to stop him, and he wouldn’t listen if I tried. You know how he is.”

Arthur cracked a smile. “Never does as he’s told?” At Leon’s wry nod, much like a peace offering, Arthur said, “I’ll be careful with him. My word may not carry the weight of a crown anymore, but if you need surety, I’ll offer my person to you as guarantee of my conduct.”

“This is so weird,” Lainey mumbled, watching them both intently. “You’re a living chivalric romance.”

Arthur and Leon both treated her to the exact same deadpan look.

Lainey held her hands up and retreated toward an especially obnoxious stuffed chair. “Okay, shutting up about the tropiness.”

“I have no idea what that means,” Arthur said.

Leon snuffed, and his pinched expression finally broke. Gently, he told Arthur, “Your face is a mess, sire.”

Rather than stand on his pride, Arthur quipped, “Is that any way to speak to your not-king brother?”

One side of Leon’s mouth turned up within its shroud of reddish whiskers. “At least convince him to bring Gryff along. Gryff knows him.”

Amenable so long as it kept Leon from blowing up again, Arthur replied, “Merlin will hardly run him off if I simply show up to the stables with him in tow.” Though Merlin usually found ways around such things. Enchanting horses, for instance. Or enchanting his nosey servants directly. Leon’s expression conveyed similar knowledge, so in the interests of honesty, Arthur made a face and amended that to, “I’ll try to keep him with us.”

“I am not sleeping on the ground,” Gryff interjected, pointing his dusty feather clump at Arthur’s head. “That is not in my job description.”

“Then don’t sleep,” Leon returned curtly. “You’re paid extra to look after him, and if he wants to traipse off into the woods for a fortnight, you’ll go keep an eye on him while he does it.”

Gryff scoffed roughly to one side and muttered, “The only extra I get from you is aggravation.”

“What was that?” Leon asked, overly loud.

In a perfectly staunch and proper conversational tone, Gryff informed him, “I must remind you, sir, that I am not employed by you, nor by this manor. The only employer on my pay stubs and on my tax forms is Master Merlin. You do not order me anywhere.”

Leon puffed his cheeks out with his breath, and walked away. “Yes, fine, I know. Just do what you’re supposed to.” As an apparent afterthought, he added a grudging, “Please.”

“How very ungracious.” Gryff secreted his feathering thing in a drawer and tugged his clothes straight. “I will forgive you this time, as you are clearly distraught. Come, Master Arthur. I will assist you with packing.” He paused before he turned fully away. “Just to be clear, I am not entirely pleased with you right now, either.”

Arthur hesitated to follow him out the door after that, but Leon smirked and seemed calmer at the thought that Gryff had it out for him. “Be back before Saturday,” Leon commanded.

Which raised Arthur’s hackles, but he reminded himself that the ranking structure had changed. Leon had every right to order him around now as the more senior knight. “Of course,” Arthur replied rather churlishly. He directed a brief frown at Leon, checked the corridor to confirm that both Gryff and Merlin were safely out of earshot, and then shuffled back into the room. “Leon, if I ever truly endangered him by my ignorance of your ways, you would tell me?”

Leon uncrossed his arms and cocked his head. “Yes, I would. In a heartbeat.”

Arthur nodded, prevaricated another few moments, and then reported, “He said that Gwaine was talking to him this morning.”

Though Leon looked down, it was not discomfort. Acknowledgement, perhaps? “That’s normal. Especially if he has a lie-in and takes his pills late.”

Arthur frowned at that.

“Was Gwaine nice to him?” Lainey asked, her tone neutral. “Sometimes, he says things that upset Merlin.”

“He didn’t seem upset,” Arthur replied. He took a deep breath and peered out the window – at the clear and unfiltered sunlight that he had missed for a year. “I think I unsettled him more.”

Gently, Leon reminded him, “He’s not how you remember.”

“Actually, he’s very much as I remember,” Arthur countered.

“Arthur, he talks to people who aren’t there.”

“Yes.” Arthur eyed Leon speculatively. “He did that before.”

Leon opened his mouth to argue, and then merely shut it again. He hadn’t known, then.

Arthur nodded. Though it was a petty dig, he said, “Looks like neither one of us knows him as well as we think.”

“Dammit,” Lainey groaned. “You both realize it’s not a competition, right?”

“Of course,” Arthur agreed, beating Leon to it. “Thank you for your sensible intervention, my lady.” He bowed slightly to her, impeccably proper as his rank demanded.

Leon shut his eyes and seemed to be using his slow exhalation as a bid toward calm. He lost that battle, and muttered, “You really can be a dick sometimes.”

Lainey smacked Leon’s arm. “You. Outside. Now.”

Unsurprisingly, Leon did as ordered, avoiding Arthur’s gaze as he left the room. His lady was not one to trifle with, though honestly, he seemed too exhausted by his argument with Merlin to continue trading trivial barbs.

“And you,” Lainey hissed at Arthur on the way out. “Stop fucking around. If you can use all these pretty manners with me, you can sure as shit use them with everyone else.”

Arthur remained still while Lainey’s glare lingered on him, and then once she disappeared out the door too, he let his lungs empty. She was right; he just didn’t like it. And now he had to figure out where Merlin had gotten to, just in case the crazy berk decided to leave without him. Or worse, with an Arthur no one else could see. Since that evidently happened.

Arthur took a deep breath and let himself slump against the door jamb for a moment. He jammed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets and silently rebuked himself for letting exhaustion register on a conscious level, to say nothing of losing his composure entirely in the kitchen. It seemed so rational when it happened, but now he felt ridiculous for thinking what he’d thought. Even as he remembered the rush of adrenaline at realizing he would have to fight his way out, his body tensed yet again, and the lines of reality blurred in his mind. Arthur fought it this time, though. He trusted Merlin to know when Arthur was not safe – even enchanted, Merlin had found ways to warn Arthur that he was not safe, even if Arthur did take a stupid amount of time to figure out what those warnings meant. None of that was happening now, the minutia was just all wrong.

Arthur only realized that he was shaking when he took a deep breath and heard it rasping like tatters through his throat. “Fuck.” He clenched his hands and pressed his knuckles hard into his knees. He was well-rested, safe, fed, and sheltered. There was no reason for him to feel like this. Other men experienced battle fatigue; not him. He understood the process – he knew better than to fall prey to it. This weakness must cease.

When Arthur straightened, he encountered Abe perched against a table on the other side of the room, his arms crossed over his hulking chest, watching him. Stuttering, Arthur eventually managed to greet, “Mister Abel.”

Abe inclined his head once and didn’t move.

Arthur scrambled to collect himself and dug in his pocket for his borrowed key. “I have your key. I apologize; I should have returned it earlier.”

Abe remained where he was while Arthur fought to get the big iron key back out of a pocket that seemed a whole lot smaller than it had that morning. This went on for…for an embarrassing length of time. Finally, Abe rumbled, “Oi. Stop yer fussing and breathe, you daft bugger.”

Arthur froze and took a deliberate, deep breath. The fact that his body obeyed without any input from his mind infuriated him, but he choked it back. “It’s stuck on the threads. Merlin’s poor stitchwork, no doubt. He can barely mend buttons.” Fuck. His voice was shaking. When the hell did that happen?

“Master Merlin don’t mend no clothes, idiot.”

“Oh.” Arthur tugged fruitlessly at the key a few more times and then actually had to stop because he hadn’t strength enough to keep fighting with it.

“Ain’t no matter,” Abe told him, his tone harsh and yet not quite as hostile as in their last two encounters. “You still hear the screaming, don’t you.”

Arthur held himself immobile, eyes down like a supplicant – it was entirely unlike him. He was a king; he lowered his eyes to no one.

“I fought too,” Abe told him. “Weren’t like your kind of battle, but war is war. Leaves its mark.”

“Not on me,” Arthur snapped. He didn’t mean to sound defensive, but parts of him didn’t care what the rest of him thought.

“What’s that feeling you got now, then, eh?” Abe challenged. “Like yer limbs all weigh thrice as much, and you could sleep a week if you weren’t too ashamed what others might think if you do it. That normal for you? That feel good?”

Arthur glared up from beneath his brows. “No.”

“No,” Abe agreed. “But it won’t go away. Everything feels wrong, don’t it,” he divined, pushing away from the table. He kept his hands at his sides and approached Arthur slowly. His stance reminded Arthur of the best horse trainers in his stables – the ones who handled the war mounts and broke the stallions no one else could touch. “Surreal. It must be a trick, because it looks like home and it’s not. It don’t feel like home. It don’t feel familiar anymore. Everything and everyone is just a little bit off of what you remember. Enough that you get uneasy, but you can’t maybe say why. And you think for a minute it might be you that’s all wrong, but you feel just fine. Or you think you do. You feel like you been feeling for years, so it can’t be you. And if it ain’t you, it must be them. Everything else.” He flapped his hand through the air to indicate the manor in general. “Everything else bein’ wrong around you is the thing that makes sense.” Abe had traversed the entire room so smoothly that it startled Arthur to realize how close they were. “That’s when you’re dangerous. You understand? When you start thinkin’ like that, that’s when you’re heading down a path you don’t want to be on. People get hurt at the end of that. People you don’t want to hurt.”

Arthur stared at him. He tried twice to speak, and finally rasped, “You speak from experience.”

“Aye, I do.” Abe eyed him over, presumably to appraise the fitness of Arthur’s mind. “Listen. I don’t like being friendly with folk I don’t like, and you don’t want to look weak or needy – I get that. But us that fought – us that are still comin’ back from our battlefields? We ain’t got nobody else but each other. We got to look out for our own. We’re still brothers, no matter whether we like each other or not. That sound right?”

Warily, Arthur nodded. It sounded exactly right, in fact.

“Good.” Abe regarded him with suspicion, but for the first time, also with a hint of respect. “Next time you start feelin’ dangerous, you come find me. Got it? I been dangerous myself. I ain’t gonna judge or take the piss out of you. I’ll just stick by until it passes. Keep you safe so you don’t hurt nobody you don’t want hurt.”

Arthur’s spine curved itself into some kind of squirming denial. “I’m fine,” he insisted.

Abe nodded, though he must have known it was a lie. He didn’t confront Arthur on it, though. Instead, Abe stepped back and nodded at the pocket where Arthur’s hand was now trapped along with his snagged and thread-tangled key. “Go on, get that out of there and give it back.”

Though he wanted to put Abe in his place for having the impudence to order Arthur around like a common peasant, Arthur wanted out of this whole conversation more. He yanked the key and tore out a dozen loose threads with it. Abe took it before Arthur simply dropped it in an effort to be rid of this room, and everything in it. Manners, Arthur thought. He needed to show his good manners; these were Merlin’s servants, and Merlin liked his staff treated well. Or he assumed so, at least. It was probably a safe bet. “I appreciate your encouragement, but I assure you, I have no need of any accommodation.”

“That’s fine,” Abe agreed, stepping back with his key. “Offer stands regardless.”

“Yes, fine,” Arthur mumbled. “Thank you.” He spun away and forced himself to walk upright, with purpose, shoving the battlefield from his mind. Halfway up the stairs, he glanced down to find his hand pressed hard against his stomach as if to stem the flow of blood from a wound that wasn’t there. Arthur curled his hand into a fist and forced his arm to hang straight at his side as he continued on.

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TBC