Work Text:
The man in the conference room is unlike anyone Ziva has seen before.
He’s clearly quite young—the lines on his face are from laughter, not age, and the birth date on his ID puts him at just over twenty-seven—but his eyes are old. The icy blues track everyone who passes in the hallway, sharp and wary, tempered with a glint that speaks of horrors weathered and battles fought. His spine is stiff, jaw clenched, and every so often his fingers twitch, almost like an ingrained reflex.
When she and Tony step into the room, he sweeps them both with a long, shuttered gaze, like he’s the one running this interrogation. The strange part is that she truly feels stripped down to skin and bones when his eyes rake across her face, not in the lewd way that Tony seems to mentally undress her, but like the man can see into her soul.
Perhaps he likes what he sees, because the man relaxes slightly in the chair, shoulders slumping just a fraction.
“I’m a schoolteacher,” he says quietly, unassumingly, when Tony asks, but she doesn’t believe that for a second.
Or at least, doesn’t believe that’s all he is. A quick search indicates that Merlin Emrys did indeed go into teaching five years ago, straight after graduating with honors, and has worked at the same school his entire career so far. He has a steady 9-to-5, owns a quaint little home in the suburbs, and pays his taxes on time every year. There’s no indication of combat experience on his record, never mind anything traumatic.
But she has seen these signs. Knows them well, every time she looks in the mirror. He doesn’t like feeling trapped, doesn’t like being watched by strangers on all sides, doesn’t like feeling exposed.
Where could that come from, if not from repeatedly having your life put in danger?
“Arthur is the marine,” he says when she asks, and the corner of his mouth lifts in a little smile, almost involuntarily, at the mention of the man’s name.
Ziva knows that sign, too.
“You’re listed as next-of-kin for Captain Pendragon, Mr. Emrys. Your relationship with him?”
“His friend.” A sharp twist of his lips accompanies that declaration, and Ziva hears the unsaid word just fine. Lover. Given Pendragon’s station in the military, she can understand why he doesn’t say more.
“Just his friend?” Tony presses, clearly having the same thought, and she hates the thinly-concealed fear instantly scrawled across the man’s features. “Mr. Emrys—”
Ziva lays a hand on Tony’s shoulder. He stops.
“And when was the last time you saw Captain Pendragon?” she asks.
The man scowls imperceptibly, there and gone quick enough that even Ziva barely catches it. “Eight and a half months ago.” His voice is impossibly bitter, and her heart clenches. Then he sighs, bitterness bleeding away into something far more weary. “I spoke with him five days ago, when he called me to say he was coming home. For good.”
“He wasn’t re-upping?”
“No. He didn’t sound any different than normal when we spoke, just happier, and I haven’t heard from him since. Though that’s not uncommon,” he adds, preempting the next questions. Ziva is privately impressed, though she ensures her neutral expression doesn’t slip. “Then NCIS agents knocked on my door this morning and dragged me here with no explanation, so I need someone to tell me what the hell is going on.” The man doesn’t yell, tone low and flat, but it’s uncannily similar to the way Gibbs can put steel behind his words without ever having to raise his voice.
Ziva wonders where Merlin Emrys, schoolteacher, learned to do that.
There’s a long pause, during which the tension in the room ratchets up like a rubber band pulled and pulled well past its breaking point.
Tony is the first to snap. “Mr. Emrys, Uther Pendragon is dead.” He tosses a Manila folder onto the table, open to a picture of Uther Pendragon lying on Ducky’s autopsy table, pale and bloodless.
The man stiffens, but continues in that unflappable tone. “Please, call me Merlin.”
“You’re incredibly calm to find out a good friend’s father is dead, Merlin.”
But he’s not calm, Ziva realizes as soon as Tony says the words. Just good at hiding what he’s feeling.
“Uther Pendragon was a bastard. I won’t waste any tears on him.”
Ziva wonders about this Merlin Emrys, pale and thin as a waif, a schoolteacher from suburbia yet as much a soldier as she’s ever seen, with nerves of absolute steel and something unnameable in his eyes that feels older than them all.
Then Tony speaks—
“Well Merlin, perhaps it would interest you more to know that Captain Pendragon has been missing for forty-eight hours.”
—and his calm, quiet strength crumbles right before her eyes.
-
In the minutes after that revelation, Merlin is a different man. He fixes Tony with a glare that can only be described as feral, and there’s a raw, almost brutal glint in his eyes that’s enough to keep both her and Tony at a standstill while Merlin dials numbers into his phone.
“Arthur’s missing,” are the first words he speaks—growls—when whoever’s on the other end picks up.
“Mr. Emrys—” Ziva starts, except then Merlin puts the phone on speaker, and she swallows away the rest of her sentence. Maybe they can learn something from this conversation.
When? A deep, gruff male voice asks.
“Forty-eight hours.”
The voice swears. I knew he shouldn’t have gone to see Uther. Nothing good ever happens when that bastard’s involved.
So Captain Pendragon was visiting his father forty-eight hours ago. Ziva makes a mental note to file that away for later.
“Uther’s dead, Leon.” Merlin is cold, impassive.
The voice—Leon—is silent for several moments. Confirmed?
Merlin cracks a black, bitter smile. “Confirmed.”
Any leads on Arthur?
Blue eyes meet hers for the briefest moment. She wishes they had something, anything, to offer other than a pool of Captain Pendragon’s blood large enough to belong to a corpse, but they’ve been at a dead end from the start. Ziva shakes her head slightly, and Merlin looks away.
“NCIS is investigating,” Merlin replies, in a tone of voice which suggests exactly what he thinks of that. Mildly rude, sure, but Ziva can’t shake the feeling there’s something far deeper at work here that they’re not seeing, and finds herself strangely unoffended.
We’ll find him, Leon says. It’s a vow if she’s ever heard one.
Once Merlin hangs up, he deflates. Every muscle in his body seems to sag, even his fingers resting flat and still on the table. The predatory gleam in his eyes softens into pain, haunted and bleak, as he meets her gaze.
This man, Ziva would have no trouble believing as a teacher.
Merlin’s voice is quiet when he speaks, no trace of the earlier bite. “Are you looking for him?”
Against all odds, it’s Tony who responds, in the gentlest tone she’s heard him use all day. “With everything we’ve got.”
Merlin nods. Stands. Takes a breath. There’s a strangely mechanical quality to his every motion. “Before you tell me anything, I’m guessing you’ll want to interrogate me first?”
Though posed as a question, it’s really not. Ziva finds herself nodding, wrong-footed again by this schoolteacher who she can’t decide whether to protect or protect herself from.
Maybe a bit of both.
-
If she looks, Ziva’s sure she’d find a statistic about what percentage of murders are committed by spouses angling for a payout. This man doesn’t seem like the type, but it’s a line of questioning they’re required to undertake.
“You think he did it?” Tony asks, but even he, who normally loves the murderous spouse angle, sounds half-hearted.
Ziva doesn’t respond, but that’s answer enough. There’s something about the man that makes her think he’d sooner carve out his own heart with a scalpel than harm a hair on Captain Pendragon’s head.
Gibbs enters the room the way he always does, measured and sure, an air of foreboding surrounding him that suggests the calm is just a facade. Lesser people who’ve sat in that exact same chair have folded before Gibbs even takes a seat.
This man, Merlin, doesn’t even react, expression still exactly as impassive as it’s been for the past three hours while he waited.
There isn’t much, Ziva has realized, that rattles him. She wonders what battleground hardened his nerves so well.
Gibbs jumps right in, pulling no punches. “Captain Pendragon comes from a long line of money, Mr. Emrys. Were you aware of this?”
“Arthur and his father were never close. When he turned his back on the family business to join the Marines, that was the last straw. Every penny of the Pendragon fortune will go to Morgana, not Arthur.”
“Half-sister.”
“Yes.” Merlin shrugs, fingers twisting and untwisting. “Arthur didn’t care. He never wanted Uther’s money.”
“And you?”
Merlin scoffs, his lip curling derisively. “No.”
“What about Captain Pendragon’s money? He had a life insurance policy worth triple your annual salary.”
Something cold flashes in Merlin’s eyes. “Arthur isn’t dead.” His voice is chilled ice, and even with a concrete wall and one-way mirror between them, a shiver runs up Ziva’s spine. “He has a life insurance policy, and it won’t be paid out to anyone for a long while yet.”
“You seem awfully sure,” Gibbs says neutrally, but there’s a kindness there, maybe even a trace of sympathy, that tells her he’s starting to dismiss this mysterious Merlin as a suspect.
“I am.”
Gibbs leans back in his chair like the idea isn’t ridiculous (like maybe he even believes Merlin’s steadfast conviction that Captain Pendragon is still alive).
“I know he isn’t dead because I didn’t kill him,” Merlin says. Ziva’s breath catches. “And there is nobody else on this planet who could.”
His words seem to carry the weight of centuries, and despite how preposterous it all sounds, Ziva somehow finds herself believing him too.
-
Uther Pendragon, Ducky tells them, was stabbed to death. All things considered, it’s a fairly obvious conclusion, given the great big stab wound in his abdomen and the bloody knife sitting on the counter in Abby’s lab. Doesn’t take much more than two functioning eyes and half a brain to put it all together.
Captain Arthur Pendragon, Abby tells them, is the most likely suspect. This is only slightly less obvious, but far more troubling—his prints are on the hilt of the knife, which is drenched in Uther’s blood, and a strand of his hair is found on Uther Pendragon’s body right next to an assortment of Captain Pendragon’s personal effects.
It’s almost too perfect. Like a framing.
Gibbs slaps a picture of the knife on the table in front of Merlin, asking a thousand questions just by his silence alone. Ziva doesn’t know why she continues to watch Merlin’s interrogations instead of spending this time running down all the various leads sitting on her desk, not least of which includes bank account information that might help nail Arthur Pendragon’s motives for the murder, except that she finds herself drawn again and again to the one-way mirror, to the way Merlin’s eyes seem to hold secrets older than NCIS itself.
Merlin pales as those same eyes take in the photo of the knife. “That’s Morgana’s,” he says quietly.
“Captain Pendragon’s prints are on that knife, Mr. Emrys,” Gibbs counters calmly.
“I can’t explain that.” Merlin shakes his head, not like he doesn’t believe that information, but like he couldn’t care less. “I understand your need to conduct a thorough investigation. Keep me here, talk to Morgana, anything you need to do. Just, please. Find him.”
There’s a desperate plea in his voice that rings in her ears the rest of the day.
-
Morgana Pendragon paints the picture that Merlin either wouldn’t, or couldn’t.
Uther Pendragon. A father too busy with board meetings to pay any mind to his children, except when he was far enough into the bottom of a bottle to swing at them with his fists. Arthur Pendragon. A young boy, blond and blue-eyed like the mother taken from the family too soon, but with none of the wide-eyed innocence all children deserve. Taking the blows and the bruises so his sister didn’t have to, never mind that he was years younger than her. A protector from the start, who joined the Marines as much to get away from Uther Pendragon as to make a career of what he’d been doing since childhood.
And Merlin Emrys. Arthur’s childhood friend and clearly so much more besides, the light and joy of his life.
“He’d be dead if not for Merlin,” Morgana says. She has the same icy, preternatural calm about her that Merlin does, but she’s somehow even more unnerving. Like a porcelain doll, untouched and untouchable. “I’ve never seen two people love each other like they do. If you think Merlin had anything to do with his disappearance, you must be blind as well as stupid.”
It’s a testament to how much Gibbs seems to agree with her that he doesn’t react at all.
“It sounds like you wished Uther dead as much as anyone, Ms. Pendragon,” he says instead. “If not for how he treated you and your brother, then certainly for the money you now stand to inherit.”
“I prefer LeFay,” she snaps, then takes a steady, calming breath. When she smiles, a shiver runs down Ziva’s spine. “I certainly did, for Arthur and for the money both. But it seems someone else had the pleasure of killing him first. If I were you, I’d take a closer look at our dear uncle John Agravaine.”
Well then.
-
“Gibbs?”
Gibbs looks at her, one eyebrow slightly arched. Yes, David?, the look asks.
“There’s something I’d like to do.”
At his core, Gibbs is nothing if not a big old softie, which is how an hour later she’s back in the conference room with Merlin, Captain Pendragon’s ring held tightly in her hand. It’s a simple silver band on a leather-cord chain, but Ziva didn’t become a Mossad operative without being able to read between the lines.
“We’re still collecting evidence from many of Captain Pendragon’s personal effects, but...I think you should have this.” She reaches out and sets the ring on the table with a light thud.
“It’s heavier than it looks,” Merlin says quietly, but makes no move to reach for it. “He wanted a weight that he could feel.”
Silence stretches on. There’s nothing to say.
Instead, Ziva watches Merlin. She watches the way his eyes bleed with emotion as they squeeze shut, watches the way they’re almost robotically empty when opened again, watches the way he lets out a jagged breath when he picks up the ring with trembling fingers. His face is wiped blank.
“Thank you.” The words are little more than a whisper, low and tight and thick with suppressed tears.
“Morgana told us about Arthur.” It feels right to use his name, in his moment. “How he protected her from Uther. He seems like a very good man, Merlin.”
“You haven’t found him yet,” Merlin says after a beat, a statement and not a question.
She shakes her head. “If there is any update, you will be our first call, Merlin.”
He smiles, mirthless, and nods.
The ring glints in the light of the overhead bulb as he smooths a thumb repeatedly across the surface, soft and gentle like he’s imagining something other than cold metal beneath his fingers.
In that moment, Ziva wishes she found it easy to cry.
“You’ve experienced loss, before,” he says suddenly, voice serious. He peers up with those shrewd blue eyes, and not for the first time, Ziva feels laid bare.
“Yes. As have you.” It was the very first thing she recognized in him.
Merlin nods, once. “Then you know. All losses are difficult; they hurt, they make you cry. But there are some...there are some you do not come back from.”
She thinks of the people she has lost, thinks of the people she could lose to gunfight tomorrow—her team, Tony—and nods. “Yes.”
Something about Merlin makes the rest of the words dry up in her throat, not as though she doesn’t know what to say, but almost as though nothing more really needs to be said at all. The pain written all across his face, one she knows is echoed on her own, says plenty enough.
Several minutes pass in a thick, but not uncomfortable, silence. She doesn’t move, doesn’t make to leave. They are both suspended in the throes of their shared grief, their shared knowledge that sometimes dying is the easier end of the bargain.
“I can’t lose him,” Merlin whispers eventually, his voice little more than an exhale, and his eyes are a million miles away.
-
“Mr. Emrys, I’m here to escort you out,” she says. He’s been cleared as a suspect, and there’s no need to have him occupying an interrogation room any longer.
He nods placidly and stands.
But Ziva is used to watching Merlin, now, and doesn’t miss his scowl.
“You don’t like to be called that.”
“No.” There’s a faraway look in his eyes. “It meant something else, once. I’m just—Merlin.”
“Perhaps you would prefer to be Merlin Pendragon.”
He eyes her with that shrewd gaze, eyebrows raised in surprise. She’s pleased to see the hint of a smile on his face. “I haven’t heard that in a long time. Say it again?”
His voice sounds achingly young, but his eyes are still old and far wiser than a twenty-seven-year-old should ever be.
“Merlin Pendragon.”
The smile is real, now, curving his lips up and draining years away from the age in his eyes.
“Perhaps again, someday,” he says softly, and his eyes glow gold.
She tucks that information deep into her heart and says nothing to anyone.
-
It’s Tony who makes the final breakthrough. He explains how he put the pieces together in short, clear sentences, the key being an anonymous tip-off from a man that identified himself only as Gwaine, but the only words that really register beyond the static in her ears are he’s being tortured.
Arthur’s alive. Being tortured, but alive. They’re going to find him, because that’s what they do, but she can think only of Merlin. Does he know this Gwaine? Is he Gwaine, perhaps? She thinks of gruff-voiced Leon on the phone and has a sneaking suspicion Merlin will already be at the abandoned warehouse where Arthur is being kept long before any of NCIS arrives on the scene.
She’s right.
They arrive to John Agravaine already in handcuffs, kneeling on the gravel outside like a man well and truly subdued. From some of the descriptions of what he was doing to Captain Pendragon before they arrived, Ziva thinks it’s far less than he deserves.
The man of the hour is on the entire other side of the warehouse, as far from Agravaine as it’s possible to be without leaving the premises, all that’s visible of him a tuft of blond hair buried in the arms of Merlin Emrys.
Ziva reaches them first, and her hurried footsteps come to an immediate halt. Merlin is holding Arthur like he’s the most precious thing in all the word, cradling him, one hand fisted on his back, the other running gently through his hair, uncaring of the blood and dirt crusted in each strand. Arthur’s whole body is shaking, the trembles of a man pushed past the brink who has finally, finally, found his way home.
She makes eye contact with Merlin, and suspects she’s not imagining the way those steely blue orbs are tinged with gold.
Arthur will be okay, she thinks. And Agravaine will likely be found dead in his jail cell in a couple of days’ time, an inexplicable mystery that neither she nor Gibbs nor anyone else at NCIS will bother to investigate too closely. Such is the way of things.
Ziva turns around, giving the two of them whatever last few minutes of privacy she can. The rest of the world will be here to interrupt their bubble soon enough.
“You’re safe now, my love,” she hears Merlin say, low and so, so gentle. “I got you, you’re safe.”
“Always safe with you,” what must be Arthur says back, with the conviction of a man who believes in that truth as though it were etched in stone.
Ziva suddenly has a feeling she knows only the barest fraction of their true love story, but finds herself believing in it, in them, as much as she’s believed in anything.