Chapter Text
It was a crisp October morning, where the remnants of summer had quite briskly given way to autumn by way of dead leaves and oversized hats. When Merlin collided with someone as he rounded the corner in town, it was not in itself uncommon; Merlin had lived as many years as he had collided with people at the very least, so he was not at odds to believe that this bump was to be any different.
The bumpee sprawled out beneath him on the pavement, and he grappled with the decision to help or shuffle off with a mumbled apology when he saw the sometime-familiar sight of a heavily rusted chain-link hauberk. As if that were not odd enough, he spied a spaulder bronze with rust that seemed to weigh heavy on the person. The fallen individual made no move to assume their upright position, and Merlin was greeted by a narrowed pair of blue eyes in stark contrast with a face and hair heavily matted by grime. If he did not know better, and in this instance he did not, he would think that the individual had spent no short amount of time face down in mud. He half-thought that there had to be some LARPing going on, but this was easily dismissed. He knew this town and its people would not be caught dead LARPing. Role-playing in this town was to be done by two consenting adults behind closed doors and not walking the streets for the world to see–not that Merlin had ever checked, to be sure, or not purposefully at least. Such accidental sightings were not to be lingered on.
He thought it fitting that the old Camelot citadel grounds had given way to a well-to-do town, as if the royalty and nobility of the place had somehow seeped out of the ground and into its people. The local university brought with it an air of superiority; those that attended were not all privileged and toffee-nosed, the time had long since passed for that to be so, but attending the university brought out of most the unquenchable desire to use too many instances of the word ‘one’ and the adoption of an accent befitting a broadcaster from the dark ages of television otherwise known as the heyday of RP English, where the foreigners were not to know that in the south-west of the country they shortened their A’s and up north they would say ‘wye aye’ by way of affirmation. By and by, the individual on the ground did not seem to belong.
“Merlin?” The individual groused between heaves as the armour proved too heavy for its body.
“I am he,” Merlin replied in that way some people choose to play up their affirmations, usually on the telephone when the affront of being asked for by name by a stranger was too much and a passive-aggressive way of demonstrating a level of miffed-ness was needed, though really he ought to have spent more time questioning why it was his name was known by someone he did not.
It became awkward in the proceeding moments to witness someone with no strength try and fail to peel themselves off the floor, so Merlin reached out an arm and, with more magic than strength, righted the man.
He was thanked as a quick thing, as if to save time, though Merlin had all the time in the world.
“Do I know you?” Merlin asked, and it would later be a question that haunted him in an unsettling way, as if he could forget what it was to be young and the people that had helped him feel that way. Logic would dictate that fifteen hundred years was a good excuse to forget a face; it was not the face that he carried with him, after all, and certainly not a face dirtied by its time in the lake, but the friendship, the comradery, the inexplicability of shared experiences and the grief of a life lost before any grand profession of truth or honesty or something in between could have been made.
The man repeated his name, and in doing so brought with it the visage of a lake that was once Avalon and a man who was once King. His traitorous heart did not beat faster, the denial of his eyes and ears too big a thing after many a false hope had been dashed throughout the years.
“What on earth are you wearing?”
It was all a little much, and Merlin let out a laugh somewhere between a huff and a giggle at the preposterousness of that question from a man who looked like he had robbed the Royal Armouries Museum and thought it a good idea to belly flop into a pond wearing his ill-gotten goods.
“More people will ask that question of you, mate,” Merlin replied, when the humour had left him, gesturing between his sensible black trousers and less sensible geometric pastel-coloured shirt that was tucked into aforementioned trousers and diluted by a simple tan jacket, and the brown monstrosity that stood in front of him.
It was not that Merlin did not see Arthur in front of him. It was that he had seen the ghost of Arthur in many people–not replacements, to be sure, but reminders, never more than Arthur, simply words and mannerisms that struck a match in his brain and set fire to a memory enough to thaw it out. Arthur had been his longest friend for the time he had spent seeing him in other people.
The man stared at him, and beneath the grime he thought he could see a downward inflection of his eyebrows in a frown.
Merlin stuck his hand out.
“I’m Merlin,” he said uselessly, forgetting as we sometimes do in a fit of human awkwardness that this fact had already been established. Nonetheless, the man saw fit to play along.
“Arthur. We have...met before...”
“Very possible,” Merlin nodded profusely, as if convincing himself all too readily of the coincidence that a person named Arthur would remind him of a dead friend of the same name said by a dragon to rise again. “Do you have somewhere to be?”
“Uh, I’m not certain. I can’t seem to find my home.”
Merlin had met many vagrants in his life, such was the blessing or curse of a wandering immortal. He had been called fearless by many older generations for offering food and shelter where the recipient might have repaid that with theft and murder, but he could not correct them and say that the word they were looking for was not fearless, but immortal, without losing his footing as a Very Normal Member of Society. And so naturally, and in no way because he had felt the flames of a long-lost friend in the stranger, offered a place for him to stay.
“You certainly look like you could do with a shower,” he said, as they set off in the direction of his house. “No offense.”
The brief journey was silent, but for the shuffle of feet on pavements and the rustle of leaves taken by the wind. Merlin pondered that he had only gone out for some milk and returned with an Arthur, and no milk. The Arthur in question walked very slowly, an amble really, the mark of a person who had embarked on an arduous journey but knew the end was near and that he could at last rest his limbs. The armour he carried could not have helped his predicament, and Merlin had to stop himself from voicing aloud that he actually knew rather a lot about the type of armour he wore, had seen it with an oblique oftenness back in the day. But ‘backs in the day’ did not exist for someone who looked in the latter years of his second decade, so he remained quiet. It was a hard lot to bear to have lived so long and have no one to prove it to, and one that grew more difficult with the passage of time; he could not talk about a party he had attended in the 1950s, or that an interesting figure he had met in 1543 was nothing like how history books portrayed him, or even that Camelot was real, and he had lived there, as the so-called make-believe King Arthur’s servant.
Even free from the shackles of the mistruths Merlin had told his longest friend in the fits of youth, by the shore of a lake in a departing embrace, it seemed he was destined to live a liar’s life, so he would twist his mouth when he had something interesting to add to a conversation he had no business knowing about and avert his gaze when the sadness of that forced quietness hit him.
When they got to Merlin’s front door, he made an unintentional show of looking for his house keys, giving Arthur the chance to take a good look around. He stepped back and seemed to gawk at the building. He had rather hoped not to give the other man the opportunity; as much as he did not mind helping out others, it was awfully inconvenient when they remembered his address.
“This whole house is yours?” He asked, with an undignified splutter. He parted his arms as if to do the measuring himself, which Merlin thought was quite as ridiculous as the implication. He was pretty sure his house was as narrow as it legally could be.
“It is a terraced house,” he said patiently. He had found his key at last buried deep in the pocket of his trousers, and was fitting it into the lock. He gestured with his free hand. “Technically, my house is from that flower pot there with the hellebores to that gully.”
Arthur slowly looked from the two objects he had pointed at and lowered his hands. When Merlin unlocked the door, he sent Arthur in first with the appropriate ‘after yous’ and general directions to stay put in the hallway while he started the shower and found some towels and spare clothes, the former of which was old-fashioned with many complicated knobs that sometimes did unexpected things like spray out cold water when it had been turned to hot and did not turn on when the pulley that looked like it should be responsible for that was pulled, and the latter of which was in the airing cupboard in Merlin’s room, not one he was comfortable having strangers traipse through.
When Arthur was within the relative safety of the bathroom, Merlin elected to have a cup of tea. Arguably, he was the most English man in England and therefore should have reasonably quite liked an English Breakfast tea, however without the milk he thought such tea tasted wrong, and so elected to have a chamomile tea with honey instead, even though it was nowhere near bedtime, the correct time for the consumption of such teas. Such thoughts consumed his mind until he heard the clatter of armour being thrown - or so it sounded–on the floor upstairs, and briefly wondered if his neighbours could hear, before dismissing the thought as stupid considering he had been forced to listen to Mr and Mrs Williams on his left have amorous relations not two nights past and regularly had to listen on his right to Mr Potter tinker about with odds and ends whenever the DIY bug took him. A little clatter of armour would surely not offend them, as long as it was not to be a common occurrence; and, as it had not happened before, he thought he could be quite sure of this.
He stared listlessly at the pear tree in his back garden while he waited for his tea to cool down. The pears were more than ready to be picked, as Mr Potter had attested when he had illegally taken one from a branch that hung over his side of the thatched fence that Merlin had built. It was one thing to steal, and quite another to commend the quality of the product to the person you had stolen from, and so Merlin was left with little to say; he simply decided that Mr Potter would not be the recipient of a basket of pears this year, and that was that.
It would be reasonable and accurate to say that Merlin kept his mind occupied with the mundane to refrain from further entertaining the idea that the bits of his Arthur that he could see in vagrant Arthur, who was presumably washing his bits in the shower right now, were because they were one and the same. He had thought this before, and he did not care for the devastation that followed, so he was well within his rights to think of teas and pear trees and neighbours, and whether he should get new cushions for his kitchen chairs. He rather thought he had moved on emotionally from the cherries on green design, and thought it might be nice to have a deep purple instead; though, naturally, such a change would have a domino effect on the rest of the kitchen. The grey floor tiles would definitely have to go if purple was going to be introduced. To hell with it, he ought to just rightfully replace them with black cushions and be done with it, though black was such a dull colour, and he had never liked too much of it–
Merlin startled when he heard footsteps. The tread was tentative and gentle, but the floorboards and stairs were creaky. His heart hammered quite unkindly and for no reason at all, as if anticipatory of some sort of incoming scare. He took a sip of his tea in the hopes that the calming effects of chamomile would be immediate. He could hear the route the footsteps were taking, pausing in confusion in the downstairs hallway, before entering the living room adjacent to the kitchen. Merlin took what quiet amusement he could at the expense of the man’s confusion, before eventually the man thought to walk through the living room to find him.
“Well, fuck. You’re actually him.”
He did not think his heart would rightly survive the sight of actual Arthur, clean, though there was little reason to differentiate actual Arthur from the stranger he had taken in less than an hour ago now. He remembered in the way that people do, a sudden click into place as his brain consolidated the present stimuli with an old memory that still lingered. It is why we can be talking to someone quite calmly and remember with sudden clarity that they were a friend from primary school, despite the fact that we are now thirty and, presumably, have had many friends since then. Yet Arthur was no friend from primary school; he was a King from the Dark Ages, and would surely expect to be treated as such. There would be no manhandling and over-familiarity for such a reverential figure, surely, even if they did happen to be wearing a pair of joggers and a tatty blue jumper.
Merlin grabbed Arthur’s hand and pulled him into a chair–not the one he was sitting on, as that would mean Arthur was in his lap and that was not an appropriate way to greet an old friend in any context, but the one next to him–and gave him a big dopey grin. Reverence, indeed. With reluctance, he let go of his hand and sat back in his chair with an exhilarated sigh.
“I can’t believe it’s actually you. You must tell me everything, Arthur.” He said in a rush, thinking that if this were as temporary as Arthur’s old life, he would quite like to get through as much untouched ground as possible.