Chapter Text
"I just need to hear someone say it so I don't have to keep feeling like I'm imagining it."
Merlin felt suddenly cold, and he began to hear his heartbeat. He was experiencing the urge to flee, but he did not know that that was what it was. His self-preservation mechanisms functioned only occasionally.
He opened his mouth halfway. There's nothing to say, Morgana, he planned to say, or it might not be that, or just try to forget about it.
Instead, he said a word Leon used when Arthur was not around, and pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes.
When he began to see painful silver shapes, he put them down. He also turned his head aside, a courteous precaution against throwing up on Morgana’s gold-embroidered gown.
"It's magic, and I have it too."
"What?" Morgana’s hands floated away from her sides. (There was nothing nearby for her to steady herself on.)
Merlin remembered, vividly, when he had realized the direness of his own situation. He had been eleven. He and Will had been having a trivial row - Will had shouted an insult, and then Merlin had shouted a nastier one, and then there had been a fire. His mother had come out and tossed water against the burning wattle, Will had lied to her while she did that, and Merlin had thrown up in the grass.
He took both Morgana’s hands and repeated himself, less shakily.
Tears shimmered at the corners of her eyes.
“What am I supposed to do?" Her face twisted unpleasantly. "I won't keep having the dreams. I can't bear it.”
“There are stronger tisanes, and Gaius--”
“Gaius?”
Morgana tugged her wrists away and stepped out of reach.
“Gaius knew about this, didn’t he?”
She looked at Merlin the way Arthur did in Merlin's imaginary worst-case-scenarios.
“Didn’t he?”
Merlin could not come up with any good reply.
"You don't have any idea how they've treated me," Morgana said, gaze scorching. "They haul me into my chambers like a spoiled child. They wipe my forehead with lavender-water and tell me that I'm imagining it."
Morgana gritted her teeth.
"I was never imagining it."
She wiped her eyes briskly with her sleeve, and then her nose (she would not deign to sniffle). “I’m going to go.”
“Morgana,” Merlin blurted, and threw himself in front of the door.
(He was very nearly too late.)