Work Text:
Merlin walks into the living room, having noticed a few minutes ago that the rest of their shared apartment was suspiciously empty, and promptly trips over Gwaine, who was lying sprawled across the doorway.
"Merlin!" The knight grins up at him cheerfully from the floor, waving his hand. "So good of you to join us! We were just about to send Arthur to get you!"
From the sofa, Arthur scoffs. "I'm the king of Camelot, none of you have the authority to send me to do anything -"
Merlin picks himself back up, and looks around. Everyone had gathered here - Arthur was lounging on the couch (he really didn't need to use up the entire thing, Merlin thinks, deciding he would go over there, push Arthur's legs off and sit down next to him), Morgana and Gwen were sitting at the coffee table, and the rest of the knights were sitting in a vaguely circle-shaped formation on the carpet. A meeting?
"What's going on?" He asks.
"Telling each other the stories of all our lives around a campfire," Morgana says immediately. With a flick of her hand and a murmured spell, she dims the lights, grinning. "We're all stuck inside because of quarantine so we can't fight the big bad evil that Arthur returned to defeat, and it's been so long since we all got together like this! Even when we were reincarnating all the time, I only ever lived in the same time period as, like, three of you."
Gwaine raises a hand. "Four," he corrects. Morgana looks at him curiously, and Gwaine shrugs. "Don't look at me like that, you killed me first, remember? Don't blame me for avoiding you as soon as I saw you."
Morgana opens her mouth to protest, her expression changing to one of long-suffering distress.
"Ladies," Merlin interrupts, holding up a hand. Gwaine and Morgana both huff and look away. Percival pats Gwaine on the shoulder consolingly.
"You're forgetting we don't live in a stone castle next to a forest anymore," Arthur quips. "Apartments don't usually have campfire-friendly interiors."
Leon looks towards Merlin hopefully. "Apartments don't usually have very powerful warlocks either?"
Merlin grins, and with a flash of his eyes, a merrily crackling fire flickers into being in the middle of their circle. Arthur, who was sitting the closest, flinches back, but the fire doesn't burn anything it touches, merely giving off a comfortable sort of warmth. Lancelot tentatively reaches out, his fingers brushing the flames.
"It doesn't burn," he says, wonderingly. At his words, Gwaine whoops and immediately throws his entire torso into the fire.
It's nice, Merlin thinks, watching Percival attempting to drag Gwaine out of the magic campfire. Being able to do things like this, without having to hide or cover up the very thing that made him inherently Merlin. Sometimes, he still can't quite believe it. This kind of warmth surrounding him, the kind that can't come from a magical fire.
He must have been smiling, because Arthur, watching him out of the corner of his eye, nudges him.
"Having fun?" He says quietly, the firelight dancing in his eyes. Merlin just smiles wider in response, absently changing the colour of the flames to green, then pink, then blue.
"Nobody has to hide," he whispers back eventually. "This is all I could have asked for."
Arthur lets out a pleased sort of huff, turning his attention back to Lancelot, who was now working together with Percival to try and stop Gwaine from trying to eat the magic fire.
"Much better than the Salem Witch Trials, huh?"
Gwen leans over the table, overhearing them. "The witch trials? Morgana told me about that one!" She pauses, then frowns. "Wait, what were you two doing in colonial America, anyway?"
"Vigilante work," Merlin offers, as Leon shuffles closer curiously. "I mean, not three in two hundred accused actually had magic - and I mean, the touch test? Who on earth thinks up of that kind of nonsense?"
"- and then I said, 'Mr Chamberlain, you really don't want to go about and give Hitler the wrong impression, it could have some very bad consequences for all of us', and he just told me, 'I know what I'm doing, now go away!'" Merlin shakes his head as Percival laughs. "Can you believe it? Every single thing I predicted Hitler doing had ended up happening, and when I told him that appeasement is going to lead nowhere good, and that we should be preparing for the worst, and he just refused to see it."
"To be fair," Gwen says thoughtfully, "Everyone still remembered World War One. Nobody, not even the government, wanted to think about the possibility of another war."
"And look where that got them," Merlin sighs. Leon frowned. "What happened afterwards?"
"Germany invaded Poland, like I said they would, and then two days later England ended up declaring war." Merlin shrugs. "I didn't wait to see how they would end up reacting. I enlisted the day it was announced. I did send him a short telegram, though."
Morgana suddenly laughs. "Oh, that one you told me about?"
"A very short telegram," Merlin stressed. "I literally just wrote, 'I told you so'. Then I went and enlisted before he could get mad and send someone to tell me off."
"Wait, wait, wait -" Arthur gawks at him. "You were a soldier? You?"
Lancelot nods, smiling. "He was a very good one, if I do say so myself. We were in the same platoon - well, I was the lieutenant in charge of it, and Merlin was my second-in-command."
"I was a sergeant first class, I think," Merlin said, staring into space as he tried to remember the exact details. "I led one of the rifle squads - the platoon was almost decimated during Operation Overlord. I actually died - stupid shrapnel got right in my neck - and had to revive myself mid-battle. It ended in an Allied victory, though, so in the end ..."
"A soldier?" Arthur appears to be still reeling, his mouth hanging open as he stares at Merlin.
Gwaine pokes Arthur repeatedly in the ribs, and when he doesn't respond, he calls over to Merlin, "I think you broke him, mate!"
"I have a photo somewhere, I think," Merlin says, his eyes lighting up. "Of me and my squad in uniform - I'll just magic it up, hold on -"
Morgana smiles, snaps her fingers, and with a dull flash of gold, a grainy black and white photograph appears out of thin air. Merlin squints at it. "Wait. How did you know -?"
"I was an army nurse in the Second World War," says Morgana, waving the photograph in front of Arthur's stunned face and smirking at his expression. "You didn't see me - I was never in the same area as you, coincidentally."
Leon raises his eyebrows. "Europe's a big place, I suppose."
Next to him, Arthur is beginning to lose the hilarious look of shock on his face, which Merlin thinks is a disappointment, so he searches his memories for another bombshell to drop on him. (That's what he gets for being dead for all those centuries and missing out on all the action, anyway.) Something pops up in his mind, and he jumps up.
"Right! That wasn't the first time I was a soldier, either - did I tell you about the time I helped defeat the Spanish Armada? In 1588?"
Gwen gasps in excitement. "You what?"
Elyan, who has been flicking through the history textbook he found a while ago, peers at the pages. "It says here there was a storm that delayed the fleet, forcing them back to Spain and giving the English enough time to get ready -" he looks up, sees the magic fire and Merlin, and an expression of dawning realisation crosses his face. "Oh," he says, and grins. "That was you, wasn't it?"
Arthur's jaw drops again, and Merlin laughs.
"I mean, the English had better long-range guns - Francis did some nice bit of navigating, making the Spanish lose their formation, and Charles was the best Admiral we'd had in a long time -"
"Francis Drake?" Lancelot blinked at him. "You were on a first name basis with Francis Drake and Lord Charles Howard, First Earl of Nottingham?"
Merlin raises his hands in a no-big-deal kind of gesture, and Arthur stares at him blankly, suppressing a grin.
"Merlin, I don't even recognise you anymore."
"Speaking of the pandemic," Percival says, clapping his hands, "Do you guys remember the Black Death?"
Leon gives him a distasteful look. "Please, don't talk about that, that was horrible."
Merlin grimaces, remembering the day the first of the "death ships" had arrived, their decks overflowing with decaying corpses and half-dead survivors, covered in boils and pus and strange-smelling blood. He was no stranger to injuries and diseases, having lived in the physician's quarters for most of his life at Camelot, but it had been the first time he'd seen anything so horrific. As always, he tried to help as much as he could without being noticed (those plague doctor's masks served as a very good disguise in case he accidentally pulled off a feat of healing that was just a tad bit too magical) but the plague had spread over multiple different countries, and more than twenty million had died.
"I wasn't alive during that period," Lancelot says curiously. "What was it like?"
"It was gross," Merlin replies, scrunching up his face. "Um. Rats, everywhere, who ended up being the ones carrying the plague - I can't believe we didn't put two and two together until later. Corpses in the streets. Even if they were covered with a cloth, you could see these giant, apple-sized bumps where bumps shouldn't be on the human body." He wrinkled his nose. "Gross," he repeated.
Percival laughed, smacking Merlin on the back so hard he almost fell over. "Let's be glad this coronavirus doesn't leave us with apple-sized swellings on our groins!" He looked away, adding in a quieter voice, "I had two, during the Black Death. Horrendously uncomfortable."
Gwaine nodded seriously. "They didn't let you die with dignity, did they?"
"No dignity at all," Percival replies, equally serious.
"Wait," Elyan says, cutting of Percival. "Lancelot - where were you during the year 1790?"
Lancelot squints at him doubtfully. "My memory isn't that good, especially with all these reincarnations. Was that during the French Revolution? I do remember fighting in it ... though I can't remember why, I wasn't even French at the time ..."
He trails off in confusion as Elyan does a subtle fist pump and nudges Leon, who sighs and gives him a bank note.
"We had a bet," Elyan explains, grinning as he pockets the money. "I thought I saw you during one of the fights, but it was chaos and I didn't manage to get close enough to make sure."
Gwen frowns, tilting her head. "What were the two of you doing in France?"
"And why was Leon in on the bet?" Lancelot adds curiously.
"I was also there, and I didn't think Lancelot was," admits Leon. He visibly ignores Elyan's triumphant grin.
Gwen's look of confusion only increases. "What were the three of you doing in France?"
"Don't ask," Lancelot advises under his breath.
"The industrial revolution," Gwen hisses, her voice filled with horror and anger. "I'd never seen anything so inhumane."
"Sensitive topic," Merlin whispers to Arthur, who was looking on with a curious look on his face. "She lived through it, and never forgot any of it."
"Ah," Arthur replies. "I see."
"Slave labour, that's what it was! Taking advantage of women and children with nowhere else to go, forcing them into death factories with dangerous machines and no safety measures! Twelve hours a day, and more if you made a mistake out of exhaustion!" Gwen breathes heavily, and Morgana pats her hand comfortingly.
"They weren't all bad," Merlin assures her. "Robert - Robert Owen, that is - he tried to make things better. The reformers worked for that."
"Oh, yes." Gwen brightens. "I had the pleasure of meeting Mr Owen - a lovely gentleman."
"Was it really that bad?" Arthur wonders. From what he had learned so far, humans had a habit of distorting and exaggerating their history.. "Working around the clock, women and children and men all alike - wasn't it like working in Camelot, in the castle, as a servant?"
Merlin gives him a flat look. "Arthur, I had my left arm crushed in a malfunctioning factory machine, then had it blown off again a month later in a coal mine, and then I died of third-degree burns and toxic fumes in a boiler explosion. The kind of boiler explosion that happened once every four days in the nineteenth century."
"Oh," Arthur says, wincing. "My bad."
"Yeah. I mean, as your manservant, I had to save your ass from witches, crazy knights, caves of spiders, Sidhes, trolls, bandits, various other kinds of magical monsters, but -" Merlin cuts off abruptly, thinking. "Actually, you know what, I think it's not that different."
"At least you didn't lose any limbs serving me!" Arthur retorts, then his face falls in barely concealed horror. "Oh my god. Have you?"
The fact that Merlin actually has to take a moment to think back and make sure that didn't happen makes Arthur turn a little green. Gwaine laughs at him.
"I told them," Merlin moans, covering his face. "I told them! The Spanish Empire was still there, the conditions were about as far from ideal as they could be, and the natives would not take kindly to random foreigners intruding - if you launch now, the Darien scheme would end in disaster!"
Arthur awkwardly pats Merlin on the shoulder. "There, there?"
"And then the stupid English king went and sabotaged their trading routes, pulling out all English funding - not that it would have really made a difference -"
"This seems to be turning into venting session," Lancelot observes, watching as Merlin starts to cry over the "stupid mortal humans with their stupid brains and stupid decisions". But again, he can't think of anyone who would need a good, healthy hour of venting than Merlin, who had lived through the highlights and lowlights of human history for over a thousand years. That is a lot of dumb decisions made by leaders and politicians to live through.
"- and 1814! The London beer flood! How much beer do you have to spill so that eight people drown? What kind of -?"
Gwaine nods absently. "It's good for him to let it all out," he replies under his breath as Merlin continues to lament over how he no longer sees any hope for humanity, and that it was probably the reason why Arthur returned.
" - and the great fire of London - embarrassingly preventable fire of London, more like - I tried to stop it with my magic, but eventually it got so big I physically couldn't stop all of it at once -"
Arthur, who is sitting next to Merlin and currently receiving the brunt of Merlin's list of disappointing moments of human history and is looking steadily more and more panicked, looks towards Morgana for help. She raises an eyebrow at him, sticks her tongue out, and taps Merlin on the shoulder.
"Hey, Merlin? Remember the Battle of Balaclava, in the Crimean War? The one they wrote a poem about -"
"- because someone miscommunication an order and an entire brigade went charging to their deaths without even thinking, "Hey, maybe horses and swords wouldn't go so well against cannons!" Who even -?"
Arthur scowls at Morgana, and she just grins at him in return.
(He'd forgotten how overbearingly annoying she used to be, before she started trying to kill them all. He thought he'd miss their banter, but now that he's on the receiving end of it again ...)
Morgana turns towards Gwen, whispering something in her ear, and they both laugh.
But still, Arthur thinks as he does his best to drown out Merlin's voice, he'd much rather have this than having to fight Morgana as an enemy.
Gwaine re-enters the room, carrying an armful of blankets, which he deposits on top of Merlin, who had fallen asleep on Arthur after several hours of "Merlin's Top Three Thousand Moments of Disappointing Human History" and four glasses of whatever alcohol Morgana had found in the kitchen.
"Probably best to let him sleep," he whispers, grinning. Arthur looks up at him grumpily.
"Can't you at least get him off me?"
Gwen looks at him condescendingly. "He's been through a lot, let's not disturb him."
Giving up, Arthur huffs and reaches over, arranging the blankets into a slightly more comfortable position over Merlin. Gwaine grabs the remaining alcohol and swallows all of it in one gulp.
"Right," he says, business-like. "Merlin got his stuff out of the way, but I still have several lifetimes' worth of stuff to sort out."
"Uh-oh," Leon says under his breath.