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Perfectly shaped balls of pure white drifted down from the sky. They danced around each other like ballet performers, gentle and subtle in their beauty. What little moonlight that make it through the clouds caught on the sides of the gliding snow, the glow so magnificent it stopped him in his tracks.
He watched as the snow settled on the sidewalk around his feet. Standing still, he turned his face to the sky, feeling some flakes drift down to kiss his face and nestle in the hood of his coat. He was virtually alone on the sidewalk, standing alone in the night. Sometimes, in moments like these, he almost forgot his pain. In moments like these, when the sounds of distant London traffic faded off into the distance, it was just he: he and nature.
Of course, he’d seen the snow a million times before, but this time… he rarely stopped to appreciate anything these days. His life was so full and so… empty that he had unintentionally shut himself down and kept going, because he’d given his promise. After lifetimes of lying and deception, it shouldn’t have mattered, but to him, keeping a promise was a way he could prove that he was still down there. Still him.
And so he stood, watching the snowfall, the stress of his lifetimes catching up to him and bringing all of their feelings flooding back. The peace of the moment kept them at bay, but he wasn’t sure how much longer he could last. How many lifetimes before he gave up looking? Waiting? Searching?
He hadn’t been reborn like the others. No. He had been forced to live on; forced to wait for hundreds of years, only for the time they returned to end up muffled and jumbled; wrong. They had been born at different times, sometimes stretching over a hundred years of difference.
And he was weary. So bone-weary that he just wanted his pain and loneliness to stop. But he knew that it could break the whole cycle. That if he died, the others might never be brought back. So he lived. Or whatever could pass for as living when everything made him tired and sad, always lonely.
His feet carried him before he was aware of consciously making a decision to move. They carried him along a familiar path, up a dirty alleyway and across another abandoned street, up a main road and into an apartment building. He was in the elevator in the blink of an eye.
It seemed his body was on autopilot as he stepped out of the elevator – at the right floor, no less – and fumbled his keys into the lock, practically falling into his apartment as he unlocked it.
The moment he stepped inside, he slammed the door behind him and peeled off his coat. The emotions inside his chest were welling up, threatening to crush him and strangle the breath from his body. His heart felt so heavy, thumping unevenly against his ribs, trying desperately to escape, to be free. But for all of the happiness he would feel at letting it go, he knew he could not.
He felt detached from his own body as he dusted the white snow off of his coat gently, hanging the coat up on the hook as he went past. His shoes and jeans were similarly covered, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. He doubted the world, or fate, would either.
No, instead he just slipped into the covers of his empty bed fully dressed, staring mournfully out of the window as the snow danced past it once again. And for the billionth time in his life, Merlin resisted the burn at the back of his eyes as one name ran through his mind over and over again.
Arthur.