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i. and so bulbs take root in rolling hills: such is our prelude, an ode to all beginnings.
When it happens first, Arthur is young. He is foolish. He is also very, very cold.
“It’s freezing, Merlin,” he complains sulkily, wrapping his arms around himself to fend off the chill. Goosebumps prowl his skin, and sunrise drenches the room in ink entirely too garish for weary morning eyes. “Must you take so long? I have places to be, and they require me to be satisfactorily dressed.”
“It’s your own fault for deciding to be up at the crack of dawn, sire,” his manservant replies from where he’s fiddling with the last of Arthur’s gauntlets, yawning through his words. He doesn’t know his head from his backside, Arthur thinks, too fondly for his own good. Sleep still rests heavy on his shoulders, bowing his eyelids; respectable thoughts have yet to greet the day.
“I don’t see why you have to train the knights so early,” Merlin grumbles. “I could still be in bed, rather than scraping the skin off my fingers trying to undo this blasted glove.”
“Or you could be cleaning the stables,” Arthur adds, holding out his arm for the offending piece of armour. He undoes it in a flash – scraping his nails on the harsh metal – and throws it back, watching in exasperation as his servant fumbles the toss and winds up with the gauntlet at his feet.
“Are you challenging me to a duel, sire?” Merlin asks, eyeing the armour with apprehension a degree short of hatred. “I have to warn you, I’m an expert in hand-to-hand combat.”
Arthur rolls his eyes to cover his impending grin. Sunlight dances in the windowpane. “Yeah, because that was obvious in our last fighting encounter,” he teases – because what is this if not teasing? “Hurry up and dress me, Merlin. I’m freezing my ears off here.”
They are two weeks into millennia of servitude. Neither has a clue of their intertwined destinies, the love and loss which await them; they interact with the stilted politeness of strangers, stumbling through conversations punctuated with formality. Opposing titles set harsh boundaries: though every child in the land knows Arthur’s legacy, the past that gave Merlin his knobbly knees and too-big ears remain mysterious to all.
Especially his master. Custom dictates Arthur leave it that way, but the feeling Merlin invokes – so ancient it pulls at his chest – begs otherwise.
(He doesn’t quite believe in fate, but there’s something about Merlin that makes Arthur wonder.)
Despite all interrogation – all childish jibes, all morning chatter – his findings sum to nought. Though Merlin knows everything from his breakfast manners to his stirrup size, Arthur is no closer to unlocking the patchwork boy. Conversations are stilted; roles adhered to, though lost sleep and kindred spirits have an uncanny knack for erasing the unsaid. A childhood of ceremony leaves Arthur floundering when it comes to human beings – every conversation that isn’t scripted claps suffocating hands around his throat – but with sleep-ravaged words and this boy who looks like sunrise, Arthur is beginning to breathe.
Not everything is easy. Their bond is new and rough-hewn; rusty clockwork, cogs beginning to click into place. Amniotic fluid still clings heavy to their skin, and Arthur isn’t quite sure what to make of it. But Merlin is laughing, and Arthur is arguing – “what do you mean, ‘freezing my ears off’ isn’t an idiom, you’re the one who keeps calling me a ‘clotpole’” – and when Arthur thinks of kissing him, it tastes like daybreak on his tongue.
(The thought is momentary, yet sits on his shoulder all through training: no matter how hard he tries, it will not be unseated from his mind. After hours of shield work, Merlin’s body looks more like patchwork than ever, littered with bruises and concentrated guilt.)
The first time it happens, Arthur knows it will not be the last.
ii. petals serenade the wind; be still your restless heart.
Oxygen-ravaged lungs have always been familiar, but never have they stung so much before.
“Where’s Merlin?” Arthur asks as he skids into the hollow, feet smarting from his impromptu sprint. Feral, blood-drenched breath clings cruelly to his cloak; adrenaline coats his veins. The eerie quietude of the forest should have been enough to set him on edge, but he’d been too fixated on hunting the doe to heed his servant’s warnings; the arrival of the Barghest, however, had been slightly less easy to miss.
“Where’s Merlin,” he repeats desperately, grasping Sir Leon by the collar and cursing his own stupidity. “He isn’t here. Did they get away safely?”
Leon’s answer is forced. “The group was split up; it’s unclear if the others escaped.”
White panic conquers Arthur’s vision. He’s unsure why – it’s not as if Merlin is the most proficient of servants: only this morning he’d dropped breakfast on the bed – but there seems something very wrong about their relationship ending like this, something earth-shattering crawling under Arthur’s skin. Panic like this has never swamped his system before, but it’s somehow familiar: some ancient instinct stirring, extending talons through his soul.
Arthur’s feet are already carrying him out of the hollow when the knight grabs him by the arm.
“It’s too dangerous, sire; I can’t allow you go.” Sir Leon looks cowed, and it’s only then that Arthur realises his shattered sword is drawn. He rips his arm from his knight’s grasp.
“We must get back to Camelot, sire,” Leon adds urgently. “Perhaps they’ll make it back before us, and if not, we can send out a search party if the King sees fit.”
Every nerve in Arthur’s body struggles against the counsel, but he takes in the line of refugees huddling among tree roots: tattered cloaks, bleeding skin. Vicious fangs and wolves’ eyes snarl in his mind’s eye: if another onslaught should come to pass, chances of survival would be slim.
Nobody deserves to die at the claws of such a beast,” he spits, sheathing his sword altogether too violently. “Not even worthless servants. If we get back and Merlin’s dead, I’ll kill him.”
(Leon knows better than to argue with the Prince, but his bemused expression says it all.)
By the time they’re nearing Camelot – having barely avoided another Barghest attack, nearly losing several knights to the creature’s jaws – his head is an anxious blur. A thousand scenarios flit through his mind, mostly entailing Merlin and those gore-dripping teeth. His every organ has drained into the ground beneath his feet, replaced with a howling void: emptiness claws at his insides. Something needs doing – something that had never occurred to him before the attack – but he’s not entirely sure what.
(It involves Merlin and quite possibly some kissing, but Arthur hasn’t forgiven his mind for its treachery. His lips ache for it anyhow.)
Yawning Merlin, drenched in glacial light; smiling Merlin, face aglow after cracking some witty joke. The way that grin would melt under Arthur’s eager kisses, and what might happen if the patchwork boy kissed back. The knowledge that even after a year of roughhousing, of silent treatment, of punchbag assault, Merlin still looks at him with an eternity behind his eyes and Arthur doesn’t know, might know, cannot acknowledge what that could mean.)
(Most of all, however, he contemplates his father’s reaction: immediate banishment or even death, depending on the weather and the competence of the breakfast cooks that morning.)
Arthur’s feet complain, but he speeds up anyhow; the abyss of his sternum is baying within him, worrying at his mind with sharpened claws. Sir Leon and the knights limp like wounded animals, clutching broken spears and lamenting the death of the royal horses. This isn’t the first hunting trip gone awry, but Arthur intends it to be his last: being prey isn’t nearly as fun as playing predator.
He’s so deep in his own thoughts, consumed with anxiety, he almost misses the cracking twig.
Thankfully, Sir Leon’s instincts are sharper. Within seconds, the two of them drag the group into a weary attack formation. Arthur sincerely doubts they have the strength to fend off another monstrous attack, but he assumes a defensive stance; Merlin banished from his mind, his muscles tense in anticipation.
Crackling foliage reaches his ears. He quirks his hand in a familiar signal and battered cavalry spears form a bristling, feral hide.
(To his credit, Merlin does a spectacular job of not flinching as he walks into the clearing. The troop – on edge and suffering – does slightly less outstandingly.)
“Merlin,” Arthur says incredulously, then bursts out laughing.
Merlin does not look as though he’s fared particularly well. His clothes are in shreds – probably a result of bolting through the forest with a rabid monster on his tail, Arthur assumes – and he’s holding himself in the awkward stance that betrays a twisted ankle or a swollen joint. Nevertheless, he’s there – alive, standing right there in an explosion of ferns, astonishment spreading over his face at his reception – and the relief flooding Arthur’s body is the best and worst thing he’s ever felt.
(Arthur resists the overpowering urge to clasp his servant to his chest, absorb him by diffusion, confess everything in the euphoria of relief. Yet the knights are watching and Camelot awaits, so he claps him on the arm instead and grins at his disgruntled glare.)
“I thought we’d lost you,” he smiles, and Merlin’s face is full of comfort: age-old wisdom, impenetrable mystery locked in seaside eyes. If he didn’t know better – if his servant weren’t so hopeless, if things were somehow different in this land – Arthur would taste the pricklings of magic on his tongue.
Instead, he basks in consolation. Merlin is safe. With or without any physical reunion, the cords tugging at Arthur’s stomach have vanished, supplanted only by a familiar, visceral sense of longing.
(Some things, he knows, are better left unsaid.)
iii. pollen roams on midnight air: joy blooms within the breeze.
“This is the last time I’ll dress you before you’re a married man,” Merlin muses, adjusting the cloak to cascades over Arthur’s shoulders. “Are you sure you’ll have need of me, after today?”
Arthur raises an eyebrow. “If you’re implying that the Queen of Camelot will be taking over your serving duties, I think you’ll find yourself sorely mistaken.”
“Don’t worry, sire,” Merlin snorts, undoing a gauntlet with fingers now as rough as the metal itself. “I’m a little harder to shake than that.”
It’s an odd feeling, going through the motions as if this is any other day. Merlin has become remarkably better at this over the years: he no longer skins his fingers on harsh armour, and conversation comes as easy as drawing breath. Today, however, the air hangs heavy in Arthur’s lungs, choked with anticipation and things left unsaid; light dapples the chamber in molten lagoons, a sharp reminder of a day in years gone by.
“Do you remember when you first came to work for me?” Arthur asks suddenly, watching as Merlin navigates the room with languid ease. His servant’s mouth quirks in that detestable grin, the one that makes Arthur question every inch of his ailing heart.
“Yes,” his patchwork boy replies. “I hated the sight of you. You were the most arrogant prat I’d ever laid eyes on. In fact, not much has changed.”
Arthur scowls, but Merlin isn’t finished. “Gwen and I used to launch mutual tirades about you. We had many a bonding moment over your self-absorbed antics,” he continues. “Maybe that was what led her to kiss me – I never really was quite sure.”
“What?”
Merlin laughs at Arthur’s thunderstruck face. “Don’t worry, my lord,” he says cheerfully. “I was as shocked as you. It was a one-time thing, though: Guinevere is all yours. Or, at least -” he glances at the clock – “in half an hour, she will be.”
Indeed, Arthur thinks with a peculiar feeling tightening his chest, unable to decipher what it means.
There is no question: in all of Camelot, there is nobody he’d rather marry than Guinevere. She is strong and wise and kind, traits any kingdom would wish upon its ruler; her laughter is bell chimes, her hair a tangle unique from any other. She is mischief and mirth yet the earth beneath his feet: tying him to the ground on days where he could float up, up, up and far away.
(She was secret meetings in castle alcoves, hidden from watchful royal eyes. She was hungry brown eyes, leeching comfort he was only too happy to give. She was guilty relief trickling down his spine, the blissful knowledge that happiness could be found in another pair of bitten lips.)
Guinevere is no longer a forbidden pleasure. She is lazy summer days and picnics in the woods, spiced wine and moonlight; quills scratching on parchment, the scent of freshly laundered clothing. She is swishing skirts and formal dinners, red and purple peonies: filling a cold and empty castle with something that finally feels like home.
He loves Guinevere, of that he’s sure. Just perhaps not in the same way she loves him.
The clinking of china prompts Arthur to look up. At the windowsill, Merlin is arranging flowers.
“Why daffodils?” Arthur asks after a moment. Merlin turns from the vase, sunlight painting him gold.
“In the villages, they’re said to represent faithful love.” He shrugs absent-mindedly. “Personally, though, I’m just sick of peonies.”
Arthur’s answering laugh is strangled, a swansong of ugly truth.
If he’s also sick of peonies, he doesn’t care to admit it. If daffodils are his favourites, he doesn’t mention that either. If he’s always had an affinity for the wildflowers flooding the valleys – springing up mid-hunt with humble resilience and unpronounceable names, burnishing fields with cream and gold – if the freedom clutched in his servant’s hands appeals much more to him than a life of wax seals and formalities, Arthur doesn’t let on. Because he’s getting married that very morn, and the time for childhood fantasies is over. Because he loves Guinevere, in a way that is not good enough. Because after spending hours poring over wedding floriography and catching the words unrequited love beneath the daffodils, Arthur Pendragon has long since given up pretending fate isn’t real.)
The daffodils ruffle in the breeze. Arthur finds himself wishing that Merlin had come bearing an escape rope, rather than a bittersweet smile.
“They suit you,” Merlin says quietly, crossing the room to tuck a daffodil head behind Arthur’s ear. “I’ve always liked daffodils.”
“Didn’t peg you for the flower type,” Arthur quips in response – or perhaps even in goodbye – as his escort knocks on the door and the wedding begins.
***
“Sire,” the servant outside the great hall says nervously as they wait for the doors to open, “you have a daffodil in your hair.”
“So I do,” Arthur Pendragon replies, standing on the brink of an era and letting the flower fall.
iv. glacial roots fall dormant; winter lingers, eternal in our frosted lungs.
The first time it happened, Arthur Pendragon was young and foolish.
The last time it happens, he is dying.
em>Dying, Arthur muses as Merlin struggles to carry him onwards, is not what you’d expect. There is no panic, no fluttering heartbeat, no rush of adrenaline nor burning pain. Instead, the intrinsic force that drags eyelids into slumber winds snakelike round his brain, staining his final moments with drowsiness. The thing he finds the strangest is the peace: somehow, the inevitable outcome of this situation is calming, filling Arthur with a sense of relaxation he has not enjoyed for millennia.
em>(Who believes in fate? he remembers asking as a child, a taunt to Morgana’s tales of soulmates and glorious princesses. She’d responded composedly, with all the cunning of her future self. We all should, she’d said. What we do with that knowledge is the only thing we can decide.)
Arthur hopes he’s made the right decisions over the course of his lifetime, even if Morgana had not. He wonders sometimes if too much of that knowledge can be a bad thing. Merlin’s eyes serve to prove that; no matter how many times he’d pondered over their beauty in the past, the bloodstained destinies they hold easily contradict their ocean depths.
Those same eyes are now wracked with worry, tinged with resignation. After all he’s learned over the past few days, it should not come to a surprise to Arthur that Merlin already knows of his impending death: his will to continue is admirable, regardless. They stumble over the glen, feet tripping on the grass; every step brings another knife of agony searing through Arthur’s lungs, and when he falls a final time, he knows it will be his last.
“It’s too late,” he murmurs, voice almost inaudible over Merlin’s laboured breath. “It’s too late.”
“It’s not,” Merlin says, and a smile quirks Arthur’s tired cheeks at the thought of this useless servant, this lying fiend, this loyal sorcerer, disobedient to the end.
“Just hold me,” he huffs out in reply, letting his legs go, feeling the energy seep down and into the soft earth underneath. His lungs continue to rattle and wheeze – a tired heart trapped inside a bone prison – and his own eyes are becoming increasingly harder to focus. Arthur’s body has never betrayed him before: it’s an interesting experience, almost as if he’s hovering above himself, his soul already expelled.
None of the white hot panic that had blinded him during Merlin’s absence on the hunting trip or the various life-or-death experiences they’ve fought through over the years plague him now. Even the sadness provoked by others’ deaths plays no part in this scene. Inevitability assuages his nerves. Whether he likes it or not, death is the last thing every creature has to face.
What you do with that knowledge is the only thing you can decide.
He fixes his eyes on the man who holds him, the man who has held him up for as long as he can remember.
“There’s something I want to say.”
(In his mind, he confesses it all. He opens up his chest and lets his heart spill out, every single thought he’s ever had rolling out over the valley; his thoughts on magic, the future he’d imagined for the kingdom, the one he hopes Gwen will provide; his regrets for not leaving her with child, for not telling her the truth, for not giving her the chance to find redemption or a husband who’d love her more. All those times he’d looked at Merlin and wondered, but never quite allowed himself to go further: the morning incidents, the disastrous quests, the laughter and the tears. He tells of every mistake he’s ever made and every doubt he’s ever had, but every time he’s known it was all worthwhile. He forgives himself; he forgives his enemy, his servant, his friend.)
In real life, he does as much of this as his aching lungs can handle. The effort sends him into the throes of unconsciousness, and he feels death’s presence, almost comforting: akin to Merlin by his bedside, rubbing sleep from his eyes and offering a hand to pull him from the covers.
“Come on, up and at ‘em, lazy daisy.”
Just a second longer, Arthur thinks, and uses the last of his life to caress his first love’s face, thanking him for everything yet to come.
(The valley Arthur Pendragon dies in has no daffodils. Instead, his servant weeps among asphodel and asters, fit for a king – or a lover – or a friend.)
v. millennia pass, yet the encore plays: bulbs push through the soil again.
Two thousand years is a long time to think about kissing someone.
But then again, Arthur Pendragon has learnt to wait.
There are worse places than the spirit world, he decides; there are worse experiences than death. The endless haze of nonentity – a blurred mind, a transparent self – is not unlike early mornings: the urgency of deeds needing done, the heaviness of limb and dizzy brain in an ephemeral world. Cheating fate – or cocooning covers – have never been games at which you can expect to win.
The restlessness sewn into his marrow is bearable, now more than ever. Still, patience has never been one of Arthur’s virtues. There have been many occasions where he’s struggled against the bonds of the spirit world, only to catch a fleeting grasp of consciousness: a spectator at Gwen’s second wedding, a soldier during Camelot’s fall. Party to the agonising sprout of tarmac roads and screeching cars, the toppling of an empire, his friends’ and families’ deaths.
(None of these evanescent moments have yielded a glimpse of his servant, who seems to have disappeared off the face of mortal earth. Arthur can only hope their destinies will intertwine again, but fate never seems to be so kind.)
In times in between, he’s tried his best to maintain a sense of self: he is still Arthur Pendragon, a pompous and arrogant prat, sure as daffodils are daffodils. His servant is a sorcerer, and his wife is a queen. The world is leaving him behind, yet still he waits.
Nevertheless, it’s an odd feeling when Arthur finally regains consciousness. No matter how many times he’d imagined his rebirth, being jerked awake in the shell of a body long left behind was never going to be an enjoyable experience. Not only are his limbs tingling – a sense he’d long since forgotten – he appears to be floating at the bottom of a lake; if this is Merlin’s idea, he thinks drily, he’d better have started to have better ones.
Coordinating his legs enough to get him to the surface – he may be content to sit and contemplate his consciousness, but his lungs sure as hell are not – is agonising, but his first breath of air is being born again. In a single huff he expels the death from his chest, revelling in the sting: the pain that had haunted his last moments has vanished, replaced only by the hammering of a newborn heart.
The chainmail he had died in – rusted and torn; Merlin had better still be good at polishing – weighs him down, but never has living felt so light.
Arthur treads water in the middle of a lake, laughing wildly to the sun. Fate is a mysterious thing. No endless battles or falling kingdoms await him now; only a lost serving-boy, a muddy lake and an age-old promise of peace.
Muffled shouting reaches his ears. A figure on the shore is waving. With freezing ears and rusty gauntlets, Arthur Pendragon sets off across the water: coming home, to the boy who keeps his heart.
***
“Arthur,” Merlin says, a million daybreaks shining in his eyes.
“Merlin,” Arthur says, and kisses him.