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“I had clean forgotten all, her face who had caused my trouble.
Gone was she as a cloud, as a bird which passed in the wind, as a glittering stream-borne bubble,
As a shadow set by a ship on the sea, where the sail looks down on its double.
I had laid her face to the wall, on the shelf where my fancies sleep.
I had laid my pain in its grave, in its rose-leaf passionless grave, with the things I had dared not keep.
I had left it there. I had dried my tears. I had said, ‘Ah, why should I weep?’”
-Wildred Scawen Blunt, “To Nimue”
“I won’t be fooled by you,” he told her when they first met again, so unexpectedly, on a street in Paris. She smiled and said, “Of course not.” But he went with her back to her apartment anyway, and they spent the evening drinking wine and catching up on the last five hundred years. There didn’t seem to be much harm in that, not now. They had nothing to fight over. It was almost a relief to see her, to know what she was up to. And to be able to speak honestly, too, to someone who knew it all. I thought we were the same, he used to say, and over the centuries, strangely, it had only become more true. They were Merlin and Morgana. They were legends. Yes, it was a relief to see her again. It felt like two halves once more becoming whole.
With a guarded sort of familiarity they talked about art (she’d been painting), literature (her favorite Austen character was Mary Crawford, which didn’t surprise him, but on the whole she preferred the Brontes), and music (she leaned on the piano while he played). Then, all at once and out of nowhere, she said, “I’d forgotten your eyes. I remembered they were blue, but I’d forgotten… oh, I don’t know. The look of them. Do you know what I mean?” She sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “Sometimes I feel like I’m forgetting everything. All of it. Little pieces at a time. Like, I forget how tall Gwen was, but I remember the exact sorts of flowers she used to bring me. If I couldn’t dream… I wonder if I’d have recognized you. Even you!”
“You look the same,” Merlin said. And she did. It had almost taken his breath away, like the first time he’d ever seen her, walking down the Great Hall at Camelot. All the history that went with that face, all at once. “Unless my memory’s playing tricks on me. Exactly the same. Even your hair.”
She fingered the end of her loose braid. “I cut it short in the ‘20’s, but on the whole I prefer it long. It feels more like me.” A mischievous glint in her eye. “The ‘20’s were fun. I went to the States. That was a time to be young! Were you?”
“I was young in the ‘20’s, but I stayed in England most of the time.”
“You would.” They chuckled softly. Morgana turned her wine glass in her fingers, back and forth. She looked back up at him. “I could tell you I’ve changed, but I don’t imagine there’s anything I could say now that would make you believe me.”
“No. There’s not.”
She nodded. “No point spoiling the evening, then. It’ll keep.”
Eventually the night wound down and he really did have to go. He collected his jacket, and there was an awkward pause at the door. “So,” she asked, “what’s the protocol? Do we wait another hundred years, or… are you free tomorrow?”
All he could think of was how long it had been since he’d felt anything other than utterly alone. No paths to wander that he hadn’t traced before. Tired of waiting. “Well, it is nice to know someone in a foreign city.”
“Even if it’s someone who’s tried to murder you.” She had such a bewitching smile, pun most definitely intended.
He shook his head, the corners of his mouth twitching upward. “I won’t be fooled by you.”
“Of course not. I wouldn’t expect it.”
So they met the next day and walked the streets, going into tiny used bookshops, quoting post-war poetry. Every now and then they’d run across references to themselves.
“’Great clerk of necromancy,’ I love that line. Now my neighbors just find me ‘delightfully New-Agey.’”
Merlin gave her a disapproving look. “It must be nice to be able to make light of it.”
A well-timed cloud passed over the sun and Morgana stopped in her tracks. “Do you think I don’t have regrets? Give me some credit at least, Merlin.”
“You have regrets? Like what?”
“All of it! I was young and scared and bitterly angry. I see that now. I regret all of it. All the people. The kingdom. Everything that happened.”
Merlin studied her a moment before shaking his head and walking on. Morgana kept pace with him. After a second she said, quietly, “Gwen. And Arthur, I really twisted things with Arthur, and the consequences were… unforgivable.” A sideways glance at him, no eye contact. “Clearly. But Gwen, I think, I regret most of all.” She fell silent, and neither of them brought it up again.
It was hard to talk about Gwen and Arthur, when in fact Gwen and Arthur were what each of them wanted to talk about the most. There were too many painful memories, and they shadowed even the good ones. But the fact was that the names didn’t need to be mentioned aloud. The presence of one another brought Arthur and Gwen to the forefront of their minds more than they had been for some time. Merlin and Morgana would pass by a vendor selling shawls and think at once, Gwen would like those. And though neither voiced the thought, the understanding passed between them unspoken. Gwen and Arthur were always there beside them, like ghosts.
At the end of the day, he brought her back to her door. “Goodnight, Merlin,” she said. “Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”
He raised his eyebrows. “The Princess Bride?”
“My tastes are diverse, Merlin. You may find I’m full of surprises.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Morgana.” He was on the sidewalk when he glanced over his shoulder to see her still in the doorway. “I won’t be fooled by you,” he threw back over his shoulder.
She smiled, shook her head, and closed the door.