Work Text:
Even after the battle everything had calmed down, the football players still never accepted Miles into their clique. In all honestly though, he wasn’t much interested in joining. He was happy where he was. He had Allie has a friend, and that was really more than he’d ever had. She’d never treated him like an outcast, even after telling her about his visions and quirks. Of course, it made more sense after finding out he was Merlin and she was Arthur, but still.
Something that still weirded him out weeks later was Marco had stopped bullying him completely. Miles always saw him across hallways and classrooms, sort of staring at himself and Allie. Though he got the feeling that it was more protective than stalker-ish. Like he was keeping an eye out for them from afar.
It felt so weird, seeing Marco smile at him and not feeling fear. But what he said about being in the order was true, and he hadn’t been aggressive in the slightest. It felt kind of nice, having gone his whole life without anybody by his side. Will had stood up for him occasionally, but this was the first time in his life that he had actual friends. It was ironic that one of those people used to be his bully though.
He had overheard some of the knights talking about Allie at some point after the battle, about how they would never actually follow her as their king because she’s, well, a she. Miles still didn’t have the confidence to say anything to them, but he saw Marco standing up to a few of them in the halls.
In his own form of retaliation, Miles started playing pranks on them. Nothing serious, just making them burp in front of their crush and things like that. After a couple of times doing things like that, Marco caught his eye in the hallway and smiled. It became somewhat of an inside joke.
Anyways, Allie was still dating Will, one of the only knights/football players who had never said something snide about her being king, and that left a lot of time where Miles had to find things to do on his own. Lunch time was their’s, sure, but before and after school he spent a lot of time alone in the library or in the cafeteria trying to get his assignments done in his self-imposed shortened time frame.
One day, while on his own wandering the library shelves, a vision hit him out of nowhere. There was of a spill in the cafeteria, and Marco slipping and hitting his head bad on a table. When Miles came to, he was leaning against the shelves clutching his head as the last of the migraine left.
He looked up and saw Marco walking towards him looking concerned. “Hey, man, what’s wrong?”
Miles, still a little wary around his old tormentor, hiked up his backpack and hunched in on himself. “No-nothing. Nothing at all. The lights, they’re a little bright. Got a headache is all.”
Marco didn’t look convinced, but he nodded. “Alright, well Allie’s with Will, so if you need help with your headache, you just gotta reach out alright?”
He nodded, understanding the words not being said. He was a little nervous about the sudden change in character still, after years of a certain dynamic between them he didn’t really know what to expect anymore. Still, he would try to give Marco a chance.
Marco started to walk away. “Hey, uh, watch where you step. Wouldn’t want you to slip.”
Understanding dawned on Marco’s face after a second, and he turned away slowly. He walked away, taking careful steps.
Later that day, at lunch, Allie and him were talking about new ways he might be able to use magic, when the time from his vision rolled around. Miles stopped talking abruptly, and Allie quieted too, knowing what the look on his face meant. Marco walked down the middle aisle of the cafeteria, right in the path of where somebody had spilled milk on the white floors.
Marco caught Miles’ eye right before he took the damning step, then froze. He casually put his foot down and walked around the trash can, avoiding the slip.
Miles let out his breath and continued talking with Allie like nothing had happened. When he caught Marco’s eye again, the knight winked. It made Miles blush and stutter in his conversation, which he was just hoping Allie hadn’t caught onto.
He and Marco became unsteady friends after that. He had never seen somebody avoid whatever he predicted of them in his visions. Nobody had really taken his warnings seriously, or maybe he was too cryptic and awkward for people to normally pick up what he was talking about.
He talked to Allie about it and she thought maybe it was something to do with him being in the order. Maybe his dad had talked to him about something like that. It was possible, but somewhere in Miles he hoped that he was starting to get some respect from his peers.
That wasn’t a fair statement, Allie respected him, but she was his best friend. She had always been his best friend since she started at Avalon High. She hadn’t able to completely avoid his visions because he either didn’t give her enough information or they were too big, like Mordred coming back.
A couple weeks later Miles started getting a bad feeling when he was in town. At school and home it would be fine, but anywhere else he went, a bad feeling followed.
He talked about it to Allie and Will, but they didn’t feel the same thing. They told him that Mordred was gone and he was probably just paranoid because nothing bad had happened for a long time. But he couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched, and not in the way the knights and Marco had been looking out for them.
See, Mr. Moore had just been fired once they told the school he had been trying to force them to fight each other and him. Coupled with trying to convince everybody of who Allie actually was made the principal deem him unfit to teach.
But the others were treating it like he had been imprisoned or something. Like he couldn’t still be lurking around. He probably had even more reason to go after them now, since he lost his job and reputation.
After school he walked to the house of the only person he could think of that might believe him.
“Hey, Miles. Uh, Will is with Allie right now and I’m not sure when they’ll be back but-”
“No, Marco. I’m here to talk to you.”
“Oh, well then. Come on in.”
They sat across from each other in the living room as Miles explained the bad feelings he’s been getting. How there’s somewhat of a bad aura around the whole town wherever he goes and what Allie and Will said.
“Please tell me I’m not crazy.”
Marco shot him an unimpressed look. “Ah yes. Boy who can see into the future and preform magic is crazy because he can sense bad things in town. Nobody else can but surely the magic boy is making everything up.”
“Ha ha.” Miles deadpanned.
A curious look crossed Marco’s face. “It is concerning, especially considering we really don’t know where Mordred went. We don’t see him around school anymore but Allie goes on a lot of runs on her own. If you’re sensing him around here, he could show up anywhere.”
“You think he could hurt Allie?”
“Well, if he’s out there. I don’t see us being safe for any reason. Especially Allie.”
A cold feeling grew in Miles. Merlin had been the right hand to Arthur. His life had been dedicated to protecting his king. Miles felt a similar devotion to Allie, in protecting her. Not only as his king, which she still was, but also his best friend.
Something must have shown on his face or in his body language, because Marco reached over and put his hand on Miles’ knee. “You have to remember, though. You were given a powerful gift. What kind of visions did you get before Mordred attacked last time?”
“Well, there was the one when Allie had track, one about her stubbing her toe, about the order book-”
“Most of your visions are about Allie, because you are here to protect her. At least the ones that come naturally. I’ve heard you can sort of summon them on?”
“If I concentrate hard enough, I can force it. But those can knock me on my ass worse than usual. I mean, the normal ones have calmed down somewhat in their force, but it’s still like getting hit with a single brick instead of a bag full. I mean, you saw in the library.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“The ones I summon are ten times worse. I’ve tried with Allie a couple times. Without an imminent threat, it’s taken me nearly five minute to be able to open my eyes again.”
“And with a threat?”
“Then there’s adrenaline, and I guess. I’ve never really thought about it. It was really only the one time and we had a lot more going on and-”
“Merlin, calm down. I’m sorry I let my curiosity get the better of me. My whole point was that you get visions when Allie is in danger of even something small. Or when there’s something you can do to help her out. You have visions of the moments right before disaster to protect her from them or help her through them. That’s your greatest ally right now.”
“I’ve had a couple others. Like Will getting tackled hard during that game. Like you slipping.”
“Perhaps it extend to those in your circle.” Miles looked uncomfortable with that thought. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No, no. I’m just not used to having… friends. It can be hard to tell when people are actually there for you or are waiting to make fun of you. And hard to actually go to people for help and accept it when they offer.”
“I really am sorry about everything before-”
“It’s alright. I understand why you did it. I really do. You did it to protect Arthur, even if we both had the wrong one at the time. I can’t fault someone for trying to protect Arthur.”
Miles stood to thank his host and leave, but Marco opened his mouth before he could excuse himself. “Before you go, I would like to show you something.”
Marco led him up the stairs into his room. It was decorated completely unlike how he would’ve expected before the battle. There were some band posters on a single strip of wall that would be seen if the door was just cracked, but bookshelves covered every wall other than where the bed was. There were ancient-looking armor and blades on shelves and leaning against the plaster. There was a large vase on the ground near the closet with staphs like the one Miles had shrunk into a pen-size.
“Where did you get all this stuff?”
Marco had a slight blush tinting his cheeks as he answered, but Miles was too enamoured by the decoration to notice.
“I told you my dad was in the order, right? Well, a lot of this was his. Almost every member has some relics in their collection. You see,” Marco sat on his bed and gestured wildly around the room, “there isn’t one meeting place for the order. In fact, there are rarely meetings at all. More like a vast web of members whose lineage go back to Camelot and the surrounding villages. These are the people who first predicted the return of the king, and kept careful track of that ever since. They saved everything they could from the knights, preserving history or attempting to recreate or translate it in the case of texts.”
“So, the order is just a disorganized group of descendants?”
“Decendants, yes. Disorganized, no. We have meeting houses all through the world, mostly in Europe though. The nearest house is here in Annapolis, luckily for me. We share resources and information around so we can best protect the next Arthur.”
“So they know about..”
“In short, yes. They know that Arthur has returned, and her knights, but they do not know it is Allie. See, the order members have dedicated their lives to that of preserving the artifacts they could and do their part for the protection of the king. But they also respect Arthur too much to interfere with her life. If there were a fiercer power that the knights could not handle, it would have to go through all of Camelot to reach Arthur, but not before their king asks for their help.”
“But you could call them if need be?”
“It would take a few days to congregate, but yes. With enough preparation, there would be a trained army willing to die for her highness.”
Miles let out a breath he’d been holding. Some of the tension draining from his body as he considered that Allie’s protection might not all be on his shoulders. His phone beeps, it was Allie asking if he wanted to hang out.
“Uh, I do have to go soon. You said you wanted to show me something?”
“Right!” Marco hopped off his bed and walked to his desk, where a leather-bound book rested alone. “I have been in constant contact with the Order since I figured out Mr. Moore was Mordred. There’s a lot of things in here that would help to fend him off, actually, that I kept here because we thought will would be the king. Anyway, when the battle happened and you became Merlin, I reached out to be able to give this to you.”
Miles took the journal being held out to him, and the moment his fingers touched the cover a vision hit him. He clutched his head and groaned and an oncelot of memories that flooded his brain.
He saw flashes of himself with Arthur, but they were different people. The original Arthur and Merlin. He had memories of their battles together and their dinners with the knights. He saw betrayals and victories and moments alone. He saw things from the eyes of Merlin, things that the history books could never have known about.
He became aware of the world what felt like hours later. He was still in Marco’s room, but he had ended up sprawled on the floor clutching the journal. He heard faint arguing downstairs, then footsteps coming swiftly towards him.
He was still holding his head when Allie burst through the room.
“Marco what did you do!” She all but shouted.
Miles groaned and shushed her. His head was still pounding, though it was slowly fading away. Allie whispered an apology to him.
“I didn’t-. I was just trying to-”
Miles was finally able to open his eyes and stand up, and he hugged her as tight as he could. “He gave me Merlin’s diary. The original Merlin. It gave me what your dreams give you.”
They would be best friends with or without the memories, that much they had already discovered, but having the memories of their former lives being best friends and knowing that nothing had been able to break them apart was comforting in ways he didn’t know it could be.
He had gone so long without anybody he could count on, nobody who he could talk to or hang out with. To the point where he pushed people away before he could get attached. It was an entirely new feeling that he didn’t really know how to deal with.
He pulled away from Allie, who had clung onto him just as hard, and turned to Marco. “Thank you, Marco, really.”
He and Marco never reached out to shake cands or hug like one might expect after a really nice gesture, but they weren’t there yet. Marco just nodded while Allie led them both out of his house and to her mom’s car.
On their way back to her house, Miles was thumbing through the pages of the diary when a thought occurred to him.
“How did you know I was at Marco’s house? And where’s Will?”
“Will ended up getting a call from the team that they were going out for something. And when you didn’t text me back, I called. Marco picked up and said you had basically passed out from a vision. I didn’t really give him a chance to explain and just drove over as fast as I could. Form what he said, I think you were out for around eight or nine minutes before I got there. He tried moving you but you would flinch away.”
Miles nodded along to the information. He was never really comfortable having visions around anyone other than Allie. Anybody else touching him in his vulnerable state usually produced the same effect or worse. The duration was a little concrning, but it wasn’t a normal vision, it was so much more.
“Why were you over there anyway? I know that Marco doesn’t bully you anymore, but I didn’t expect you to hang out with him.”
“I was wondering if he knew anything about the dark aura I’ve been feeling around town. He said that Mordred could be lurking around to try to hurt you. He was only fired after all, and he’s probably also upset that we got him fired in this life too.”
“Alright. We will figure out a plan for that tonight. But I want you to rest for a litttle bit I haven’t seen you that out of it in a while.”
Miles just nodded and leaned against the car window, eyes closed against the harsh light.