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“Sometimes I wonder if I'm even human...”
It was the middle of the night, as they tried pointlessly to get to sleep, when Merlin turned to Arthur and said it. It startled Arthur at first, but after a moment of quiet thought, the resurrected King sighed and smiled softly.
“That's… valid,” Arthur assured the warlock lying beside him. A few seconds later, he spoke again. “Sometimes I wonder if either of us are.”
“…What do you mean?” Merlin raised an eyebrow, propping himself up on an elbow on his side. All pretenses of trying to sleep gone.
There was a moment of silence, a hesitation, as Arthur thought over what he meant.
“Well...” He eventually began, flopping onto his back and looking at the dark ceiling, “you're magic incarnate, no need to say more, and I'm...well, I'm a sixth century King who's supposed to be dead—who was dead for fifteen hundred years. Who's to say either of us are truly human anymore?”
“Point made,” Merlin snorted.
“I don't think,” he paused, hesitating again, “I don't think it really matters, anymore, though...What we are, I mean. After all, we're together again, yeah? We have each other, human or not, we'll not be alone again.”
Merlin went quiet, and Arthur glanced over at him. He held back a smile when he caught his ‘contemplation face’—the one with his brows furrowed and lips pulled into a slight pout. “Yeah... Yeah, that's fair.”
“Maybe, we should focus less on if we’re really human… and more on how to survive this strange world…” Arthur sighed, “I’m still new to this all… Truly human, or not, I need to learn how to navigate it, and… I don’t think I could ever meet anyone better for the task of teaching me, than you.”
“Sometimes I feel as though I am still only barely managing to navigate it,” Merlin confessed to the King, resting his head on his shoulder.
“I almost get a case of impostor syndrome when I teach you all these things,” he joked, “because sometimes I hardly understand it myself. Somethings I have to look up, I have to research, and I have to teach myself… And I have lived the fifteen hundred years of development, lived while these things were created… I stayed so out of touch, though, so caught in my own grief, there is so much I’ve not learned myself, yet I teach you…”
Arthur didn’t say anything for a moment, he just took slow, deep breaths. When he finally broke the peace again, he’d changed the subject.
“My heart beats like the normal mans… Yet, I find myself not breathing far too often,” he mused, “the food in this century is so abundant it is almost overwhelming, and there are so many kinds I find it fascinating. Yet, I rarely hunger…”
“I understand,” Merlin told him, and he did. “I find the same troubles within myself. It’s… It’s as though immortality, has taken our humanity. Is taking our humanity. Some days before your return I would count. How long I could go without breathing. Or eating. I would count. Just to see, how long I could go…”
“And how long could you?”
Merlin hummed softly, draping an arm over Arthur’s chest.
“Doesn’t matter. Do you remember…”
“I remember a lot.”
“Do you remember how we used to sneak out of the castle at night after stressful days as King and Consort,” Merlin continued, closing his eyes. “We’d go to that clearing…”
“Mm, yeah, you’d always bloom a patch of flowers and make me help you make us crowns,” Arthur chuckled softly at the memory, thinking back to those days. “Then, we would stay out until the sun started to rise again.”
“Miss that,” Merlin whispered. Arthur let out a quiet sigh. He missed it too. He missed everyone, he missed Camelot.
“Do you remember how when we first time went out there, Leon nearly sent out a search party out for us because he thought we were kidnapped,” Arthur asked as Merlin snuggled closer.
Merlin snorted. “Oh, he was so mad when we came back in perfect condition.”
“He really let us have it, it was so unlike him…” Arthur smiled as he thought about it.
“Yeah…”
Arthur sighed softly as a comfortable silence fell over them once more. He wondered what the knights and all their friends would be like were they there now… Wondered how different everyone would be.
He liked to think no one would change. They would be the same people at the core. He knew they would be.
He missed them. He wished they could come back like he had. Yet, at the same time… Would he want them to be subjected to the same unending life he and Merlin have been subjected to?
If he allowed himself to be selfish—yes, without a doubt, whatever it took to get his friends back, to get his family back.
“If you could bring them back,” Arthur found himself asking before he could think it through, “would you, do it?”
“In a heartbeat,” Merlin whispered, not a moments hesitation.
Arthur fell silent, comforted by the knowledge his husband was just was selfish as him. Merlin shifted in the pause, sliding down to rest his head on Arthur’s chest next to his hand. Arthur knew in an instant he was listening to his pointlessly beating heart.
“I tried once,” Merlin suddenly confessed, eyes shut. Arthur looked down to him in surprise. “To bring them back, I mean… I couldn’t—clearly—but I tried. Then you came back, and it was like… I’d had all this failure, and suddenly there was a light—a gift at the end. I couldn’t bring them back, but now… Now I have you, and it’s all a bit more bearable.”
Arthur let his eyes fall shut as he nodded. “Ah…”
The silence covered them again. Light began peeking through the curtains, and Arthur knew they’d stayed up through the night again. He found, though, he wasn’t tired. Perhaps another side effect of his immortality… Or perhaps he was overthinking it.
He never really knew anymore.
“Arthur?” Merlin murmured, a questioning lilt to the end of his name.
Arthur let out a soft sigh as Merlin traced invisible drawings on his chest. “Yeah?”
He waited patiently as Merlin hesitated, his hand stilling. They’d had a long week, the two of them, dealing with making Arthur a legal, living person in the eyes of the government. It was almost ironic that the one time they finally had to rest, they couldn’t.
“I love you,” Merlin finally sighed, glancing up at him from his chest. Arthur couldn’t help the small smile that crept onto his face at the words. He dropped his head down and placed a kiss on Merlin’s forehead—ignoring the awkward angle.
Then, he let his head fall back against the pillows again, a sigh slipping from his lips as the first bird of morning chirped outside the window.
“I love you, too, Merlin.”