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The thing about living forever isn’t the price; it’s the fact that ‘forever’ is, you know, forever.
Merlin turns up on Thursday morning with cups of Starbucks coffee that are still hot despite the fact the nearest Starbucks is a good half hour walk away. His haircut is still stupid because Merlin is physically incapable of having a decent haircut, and Morgana is fairly certain her security systems should have fried him to death by now.
It’s a pity that Merlin is, as always, the exception.
“I’m trying to sleep,” Morgana complains, shying away from the coffee and the smell of sunlight and Merlin’s general existence. A thousand years, and he still trips over his shoelaces more often than not. She could probably find it endearing if she wanted to, but she’d much rather find it irritating. They have history, after all.
“It’s eight o’clock,” Merlin points out with that maddening cheerfulness that never worked on Arthur either.
Morgana puts the pillow over her head. “What is wrong with you.”
She tries to go to sleep anyway, but Merlin sits on the end of the bed and slurps his hazelnut coffee and hums to himself and Morgana has to remind herself, nails digging into her palms, that they reached a truce somewhere in the nineteenth century and if she goes back on it then she’s definitely going to have to start sleeping with one eye open.
The coffee is still steaming when Merlin hands it over, grinning in a way that tells her that hiding under a pillow has not done anything for her hair.
Morgana sips obediently at the macchiato, and only doesn’t bother to say I hate you because she’s already said it a thousand times before and it didn’t stick then either.
It’s drizzling, thin and cold, under an ugly full moon. The streets are crowded, pedestrians shoving each other aside as they attempt to get somewhere warm, dry and quiet as quickly as possible. Morgana’s boots were expensive, fuck it all, and she misses the days of acceptable and more importantly unexplainable massacres, before CCTV and the internet and fast response cars.
The air smells of electricity and daylight-touched skin and of something that fundamentally boils down to wet dog, and abruptly she misses the days when humanity wasn’t a necessity, when she had the space and the freedom to live a solitary life, long forewarned of any attack. The world doesn’t work like that nowadays, though, and Albion itself has shrunk, all of it laid available to anyone with a 16-25 railcard and a willingness to put up with British Rail.
Some days, Morgana just wants to turn to Arthur and laugh, but of course that isn’t an option just yet.
Even the rain is different now, tasting bitter on her tongue, stinging her eyes. She occasionally wonders if the world feels like this to Merlin too, whose existence is different to hers but just as never-ending. But Merlin’s always known that getting what you want shouldn’t mean losing what you already have, and anyway he’s much too happy about skinny jeans and Urban Outfitters in general and the way coffee has developed since it first arrived here.
Morgana pushes past yet more people whose heartbeats are more audible than she’s really comfortable with, and keeps her mouth closed to hide her teeth, sharp and hungry and frustrated. It’s got easier over the years, but it’s never got better.
She spent a week dead when she was changed; when she woke she was alone, eyes and mouth clogged with dust, blood dried thick and ugly down her neck and chest.
The films they make nowadays don’t get the details right, of course, and the hunger seems to be what they all focus on. Really, Morgana didn’t even notice that she was hungry, too caught up on missing things she hadn’t realised were there until they were gone: heartbeat, breath, warmth.
There are different ways to live forever. As it turns out, Morgana’s method came with a lot of caveats.
“I made you a sandwich,” Mordred says with his mouth full, “and a Florence + the Machine mix CD.”
Morgana is pretty sure that is Merlin’s fault somehow, and she’s going to send him an angry email to that effect later.
“I… wasn’t aware that was still a thing,” she says, because, well, she’s pretty sure the CD is basically dead in this world of digital downloads, but Mordred has never been good at keeping on top of the changing times. Unlike Morgana and Merlin, he didn’t plan on being here at all, and it often shows. “Does it count as a mix if all the songs are by the same artist?”
Mordred takes another bite out of the sandwich she is presumably not going to be receiving now and shrugs, chucking a plastic jewel case at her.
It’s been centuries and Morgana still has no idea what’s going on in Mordred’s head. He started out doing it on purpose, of course, but now she can’t tell if he’s gone mad, if he thinks he’s doing some very strange variation of courting her, or if this is who he was all along and she didn’t notice it until Topman came into existence.
She puts the case down on the arm of the sofa, making a mental note to accidentally-on-purpose break it later, and sighs. “I’m so glad that this is a thing that I have to be part of.”
Mordred isn’t listening to her, because Mordred has never listened to her. It isn’t even frustrating anymore; it’s just a fact of life. He just keeps eating the sandwich and staring at the TV, which is showing Pointless. Sooner or later, Morgana’s going to have to kick him out – this is her bloody home and protected with the most serious magic she can conjure, people have got to stop casually breaking in – but for now she leaves him to it and goes to make her escape to part of her flat that doesn’t involve a forever-teenaged boy in a frantically ridiculous cardigan.
“I’ll have a cup of tea if you’re making one,” Mordred mumbles, and Morgana groans between her teeth.
Your perception of things changes when you die and then carry on existing anyway as everyone else drifts away. Arthur… well, that was a fucking mess, wasn’t it, and it’s her burden to carry even as the other parts of her life slip their responsibilities. But his knights lived on, at least for a while, and sometimes she thinks she should’ve turned Gwaine into this not-exactly-life too. Oh, she’s sure he’d be just as annoying as Merlin and Mordred are, but the scenery would be better, and Morgana can’t be picky about the company she keeps anymore.
Gwen. Well. Gwen’s something different, and Morgana’s had close to a thousand years to try and sort out what happened there and she still hasn’t. No, wrong word there. She still can’t. By now even Merlin’s stopped throwing Gwen’s name at her during their bi-annual fights, the ones that end in singed fingers and splintered feelings and icepacks for everyone, while Mordred watches looking bored, periodically snapping his fingers for microwave popcorn. Gwen is one of the two things Morgana would change about her past, if she could.
As for the other: this time around, she wouldn’t lose.
Merlin has an actual job, because Merlin never quite got his head around the whole unlimited power thing. It’s quite tragic, actually; Morgana would pity him, if pitying people was a thing she still did. As it is, she just seduced his manager to make that forever awkward for him, and periodically goes to bother him during his gainful employment.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” Merlin says when she appears in his office a little after sunset.
Morgana rolls her eyes and sits on the edge of his desk. “Everyone here likes me,” she replies, shrugging. “This month’s mousy assistant is getting me coffee even as we speak.”
Merlin can’t keep personal assistants; he’s far worse as an employer than Arthur was, although in an entirely different way. Morgana’s never had much use for the phrase kill them with kindness, but Merlin never got that memo.
“That’s because you bewitched everyone here,” Merlin reminds her, as Morgana opens the top drawer of his desk and begins to rifle through his paperwork. “That was locked,” he adds reproachfully.
Morgana ignores him. “Did you tell Mordred to start making me mix CDs?”
“Why would I do that?” Merlin asks, frowning. “Aren’t CDs basically dead in this day and age?”
“That’s what I said,” Morgana agrees. “But you know you like encouraging him, don’t lie.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Merlin replies, with an unconvincing innocent expression, like the whole thing in seventeenth century Venice with roses and half a dozen concubines wasn’t all his fault. “I try not to hang out with Mordred; last I saw him I gave him a Topman giftcard and told him to stop cutting his hair like Justin Bieber.”
“Well.” Morgana will give credit where it’s due. “Thanks for that.”
Merlin smiles, though it skitters off his face a moment later. “He still calls me Emrys,” he says, “that’s weird, right?”
Morgana shrugs. “Everything about Mordred is weird.”
“This is why you don’t pseudo-adopt random magical children and then sleep with them when they get older and attractive,” Merlin tells her virtuously, like his abnormally long life hasn’t been full of frankly dubious choices too.
“Ugh,” Morgana groans, sliding off his desk, “don’t go all Jeremy Kyle and judgy on me.”
“But you make it so easy,” Merlin says, grinning, and ducks when Morgana chucks his stapler at him.
They started calling what Morgana was a vampire fairly early on; a person who was technically dead but still showing at least an imitation of life, who needed the blood of others to survive, who could not go out in daylight because it burned her skin and even the smell of it stings a little.
Crosses do itch, while holy water mostly just makes her sneeze; a stake to the heart would probably kill her, though frankly that will kill almost anything, but garlic’s a lie. She also still has a reflection, which is good in this century when liquid eyeliner is such a pain in the arse to apply straight, though you can’t capture her in a photograph. Merlin says it has something to do with the soul, but Merlin doesn’t know much more than she does; he just doesn’t want to admit it. He’s still got all Gaius’ magic books, raided all the libraries in Albion for the manuscripts Uther had supposedly burned; there’s quite the collection securely locked up somewhere Morgana isn’t allowed to know. She doesn’t know what Merlin thinks she could do with this information that she hasn’t already, but she hasn’t complained too much because she has no doubt that it’ll all end up on Project Gutenberg sooner or later.
With hindsight, she should possibly have spent less time having dinner with Bram Stoker – Merlin laughed about that for approximately a year when Dracula got published – but really, it’s not Morgana’s fault for the misconceptions society has about her kind. Oh, they’re not nice, of course, and people do periodically get eaten and so forth, but really, Anne Rice just has an overactive imagination and the less said about the twenty-first century’s obsession with teenage boy vampires is just plain creepy.
In any case, Morgana has enough problems with her own sort-of-pseudo-teenage stalker to be interested in anyone else’s.
She watches the world twist the mythology and legends into things that are ever increasingly different from her night-to-night life – which mostly involves trying to find a spell that will actually make the underwire of her bra stop digging in and organising classy blood eating sessions somewhere with a shower for afterwards – and isn’t sure whether she wants to laugh or cry, if this is some kind of penance for the life she’ll never stop paying for.
Mordred reads a lot of Palahniuk and seems to have taken up smoking because he’s apparently now the bad boy in a 90s American high school movie. He’s also still living on Morgana’s sofa, despite the fact he definitely owns at least three different homes in various places, and is showing no signs of leaving.
Morgana is still blaming Merlin for this, no matter how many times he claims he’s got nothing to do with what Mordred does with his life. Merlin’s been involved all along; he’s just sneakier about it. She’s not entirely sure what Merlin thinks he’s going to gain by persuading Mordred to occupy her home – V for Vendetta mask and all; at least that implies he sometimes watches the news – but if he turns out to be violating the truce then she’s definitely going to sleep with his boss at least once more, and maybe organise some kind of petty pay cut.
“I thought you might want some company,” is all Mordred says when Morgana confronts him about it. “Someone mature to hang out with, you know.”
“You’re watching Viva,” Morgana has to point out. “It’s a Sixteen and Pregnant marathon.”
Mordred just looks non-plussed, and she huffs out a sigh. She’s sure getting her own way used to be much easier.
They have afternoon tea at midnight in Merlin’s badly-decorated flat; pots of earl grey and stacks of crumpets and a slightly obscene amount of jam.
“I am never going home again,” Morgana announces. “I’m going to live here now.”
“With me?” Merlin asks, raising an eyebrow.
“Don’t give me your You’re So Stupid, Arthur look,” she tells him, “I’ve thought this through. I’ll live here and you can live somewhere else.”
Merlin just rolls his eyes.
“I liked you better when you were subordinate,” Morgana muses, reaching for more tea.
The flat is messy and humble and cluttered, full of the things Merlin has collected over his life. Morgana has just as many belongings, if not more, but she had the presence of mind to organise actual storage facilities. Merlin’s still living like he’s an almost-ordinary person, like he doesn’t have almost as much blood on his hands as she does. It’s a different kind of blood, but as time passes that excuse isn’t as solid as it used to be, after all.
“I liked you better when you were drugged into submission by sleeping draughts,” Merlin responds, but there’s no bite to his voice.
Sometimes, their old lives are as close as yesterday, something Morgana could reach out and touch, sink her fingers into. Sometimes, the memories are flatter, almost unbelievable, and she contradicts herself while trying to untangle recollections.
She had a sister, once. She had a brother, too, but he was somehow even more complicated.
“At least I was queen for a while,” Morgana tells him. “What did you ever manage?”
It’s too much of an opening: Merlin grins, and says: “what didn’t I?”
There are other vampires in the world, but Morgana’s never had much interest in meeting them. If she’s learned anything from herself over the years, it’s that vampires are unbearably superior and prone to fits of startling and uncontrollable violence when pushed.
All things considered, it’s probably best to keep away from them. If nothing else, she’s come this far: she’s got to keep going. Forever is a terribly long time to live, after all, and you don’t get there if you don’t work at it.
“Why don’t we have sex anymore?” Mordred asks.
Morgana side-eyes him in case he’s asking just to annoy her, but he seems to actually be serious, God help her. Mordred isn’t stupid, she has no idea why he does this.
“Because you started out as a bad idea that only got worse,” she replies smoothly.
“Also you have hair like Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock,” Merlin adds.
“You’re not helping,” Morgana tells him, while Mordred frowns and says: “shouldn’t that be a selling point?”
“I’m not trying to help,” Merlin says, and: “apparently not.”
Morgana huffs out a sigh, and turns the sound of the movie up before Mordred can ask any more questions about his hair. There’s every possibility he’ll blow the television up – it wouldn’t be the first time – but she likes to think that they’re all maturing as people despite the staggering amounts of evidence to the contrary.
After a moment, Merlin muses: “hey, you know how in lots of current versions of the legends about us, Mordred is your incestuous son with Arthur?”
Mordred spits Coke Zero everywhere, and Morgana is definitely regretting that she never managed to kill Merlin on any one of the two hundred and thirty-six occasions, to date, that she tried.
“Remind me why I’m stuck here forever with you and not my sister, or Agravaine, or- oh, any number of those far more interesting people I’d rather spend eternity with?” she asks, faux-sweet. “Oh, I remember now, you murdered them all.”
Merlin tips his head to one side. “You don’t want to start this game, Morgana.”
“God,” Mordred says, having recovered from his coughing fit, “every time I think I’ve got problems I just look at you two.”
Morgana breaks eye contact first, if only because they’re in her home right now and she’s bored of fixing the collateral damage, and says: “it’s alright, Mordred, you’ve still got plenty of problems to be getting on with.”
She thinks Merlin’s silently laughing, but it’s not the right moment to look and find out for certain.
Seriously, fuck that Helena Bonham Carter interpretation anyway.
Vampires can get as drunk as anyone. So can warlocks. If they couldn’t, they’d probably have accidentally brought about a total apocalypse by the middle of the sixteenth century.
Surprising precisely no one, Merlin gets very earnest when he’s drunk, cheeks flushed, eyes too blue. He’s a man, but he still looks young, and there’s a lot left of the boy she first met, the one she considered a friend before he stood back to let her die. It’s always more than a little disconcerting, when she sees who he was before he became the most powerful sorcerer the world will ever know.
She relieves him of the wine bottle he’s waving around before they both end up covered in a very expensive prosecco, and slumps a little further down on his sofa.
“But were you ever happy, though?” Merlin’s asking.
Fuck, Morgana doesn’t even know anymore. “I had no parents, I lived in a kingdom with laws I didn’t really agree with, and I think I grew up just assuming that sooner or later I’d marry Arthur,” she shrugs at last.
“Then he turned out to be your brother,” Merlin muses. “And there’s the whole Mordred thing. Your taste in men, Morgana.”
Morgana groans, and puts the wine aside. They should both probably stop drinking if they want to make it out of tonight in one piece.
“Shut up,” she says, “everyone thinks you were an old man who had some kind of creepy paedo thing going on with Arthur anyway.”
It’s strange, how the stories about them have twisted over the centuries. Strange and, to be frank, annoying.
Merlin slides off the sofa, spreading himself out on the carpet. His hair is a mess, a half-smile toying around his mouth, his perpetual hipster scarf bunched up around his neck.
“Don’t push me,” he says, words slipping together, “I have a dragon, you know.”
“I do too,” Morgana reminds him. The carpet looks pretty good right now, actually, and she eases herself down to join Merlin, narrowly avoiding the coffee table. “I have a dragon and you have a dragon.”
They both own DVDs of How To Train Your Dragon, but it’s one of those things that they don’t talk about or acknowledge.
“People are ridiculous about them nowadays,” Merlin says thoughtfully, gaze on the ceiling.
Morgana rolls onto her side, dress tangling around her legs, head thumping.
“I could take that Daenerys Targaryen bitch,” she murmurs into the soft pile of the carpet.
Merlin attempts a deeply uncoordinated arm pat. “I know,” he says, trying for soothing. “I know.”
A throat splits under her teeth and Morgana sucks greedily, eyes fluttering closed, fingers clenching in skin. There’s moaning going on – whether in pleasure or pain she doesn’t know and definitely doesn’t care – and loosely waving hands, but she ignores the distractions in favour of drinking, warm, fresh from the jugular. She tried blood banks a few times; not, you understand, out of any sort of pity for the people Merlin calls her victims and Morgana calls a necessary sacrifice, but more because it was easier and tidier. It doesn’t taste right though, cold and lifeless and bitter. No, straight from the vein has always been best.
After a while, the flailing body in her arms goes still, heavy, and the blood instantly tastes less good. It’s at its best in the lead-up to death; afterwards, it’s an anti-climax on the tongue. She drinks dutifully for a while longer, because there’s no sense in letting a perfectly reasonable blood supply go to waste, and then lets the corpse slide to the kitchen floor.
Merlin passes her a handful of kitchen roll without looking up from his copy of A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court. Morgana dabs at her mouth and neck and then checks to make sure none of it’s gone down her top; a slightly gorier version of checking for biscuit crumbs in her cleavage.
“You don’t have to be here, you know,” she mutters. “I’m perfectly capable of getting my dinner back here and then clearing up afterwards without you sitting by my toaster and watching.”
Merlin shrugs, eyes still on his book. “Someone has to,” is all he says, and Morgana decides she doesn’t want to ask for an interpretation.
Mordred is still living on Morgana’s sofa and wearing a series of increasingly ridiculous scarves while he eats stacks of toast and watches his way through all of Morgana’s DVD boxsets.
“You do realise you’re not actually a teenager, don’t you?” she can’t help saying halfway through The West Wing season four.
Mordred shrugs, one-shouldered. Morgana is going to live forever because she swapped her soul for it, and Merlin is going to live forever because he’s more powerful than anyone has ever been and even death isn’t going to mess with that. Neither of them are sure why Mordred hasn’t aged or died; it might be something he’s doing himself, but he’s always just seemed bemused and vaguely annoyed about his perpetual existence.
He’s not the only one.
“You and Merlin hang out all the time,” Mordred points out eventually.
“He’s my nemesis,” Morgana reminds him; the word sounds silly, in this world of action movies and comic books and Syfy, but it doesn’t diminish the truth.
“He’s your best friend,” Mordred corrects, eyes on the screen.
“Bite your tongue,” Morgana tells him swiftly.
Mordred rolls his eyes, theatrical.
“I liked you better when you were a child,” Morgana huffs.
“Well,” Mordred says, “that’s just awkward.”
Merlin turns up with Starbucks to wake up Morgana on Thursday morning, because apparently he has a late start at work, although it’s mostly because he’s a horrible person who ruined Arthur’s mornings for years and then found that he needed to keep up the tradition, even if Morgana technically sleeps through the day now and therefore isn’t supposed to have mornings anymore.
“You are the worst,” Morgana informs Merlin, in case he’s missed that at any point over the last few hundred years. He’s sprawled comfortably against her pillows, so he probably isn’t listening, but she has to try.
“I think you’ll find you’re the worst,” Merlin corrects. “Aside from all the things you’ve actually done, you’ve also gone down in legend as crazy and evil, and you were the inspiration for Lady Macbeth.”
Morgana has had enough of this. “I didn’t even meet Shakespeare until after he’d written Macbeth, you know this!” she protests, kicking at Merlin. “She was not based on me in any way at all.”
Merlin looks thoughtful, hands wrapped around his venti dry hazelnut latte. “I think I started that rumour, actually,” he reflects at last.
Morgana is going to absolutely kill him next time they call off their truce and also when she isn’t in pyjamas with hot coffee. She needs to be appropriately dressed for a battle of magic against Merlin, even if he never bothers to dress up; he didn’t even wear the new suit she sent him in 1928 for whatever showdown they were sorting out that decade.
She settles for scoffing. “And people say you’re the nice one.”
Merlin shrugs. “Well, I am, when the alternative is you.”
Morgana gives him a flash of fangs, but Merlin just grins that too-happy grin at her; sometimes, she wonders how he’s managed to keep that all this time.
“I can’t fight you,” she agrees, “considering you still look like a twelve-year-old.”
Merlin makes his annoyed-face and looks like he’s going to shove her before he realises that that would put his coffee at stake, and instead he settles for pouting.
“You two are so weird,” Mordred observes from the doorway. He’s also holding a Starbucks cup; there seem to be a lot of markered instructions on the side, because Mordred clearly hates baristas.
“You brought him coffee?” Morgana asks Merlin despairingly. “I’m supposed to be persuading him to leave, you can’t imply he’ll get hot drinks delivered straight to his sofa.”
“We should keep him where we can keep an eye on him,” is all Merlin has to say for himself.
“Well then you put him up,” Morgana protests.
“I can hear you both, by the way, I am still here,” Mordred points out, scowling.
“He won’t like my flat,” Merlin replies, ignoring him, “it’s got Ikea furniture.”
It’s sometimes strange when Morgana recalls that things were so much simpler back when she was alive and all she had to deal with was not being burned to death by her father.
Dying is an art, Sylvia Plath mused once. Morgana knows this because she spent years perfecting it long before the teeth that tore through her throat and stole the air from her lungs forever. An ongoing battle that required bluffs, misdirection, risks: Morgana died half a dozen times in her quests for revenge, for recognition, for safety. Whatever it was that she thought she was fighting for, a great cause that she cannot remember now for all that she is still supposed to be existing forever in its name.
Aithusa hasn’t forgiven her for the choice she made. Morgana didn’t expect her to, but forever is a long time to live with a dragon who resents you in an increasingly unsubtle fashion.
Live with is an exaggeration, of course. Aithusa has magic and clearer skies and the world has stopped believing in her existence so thoroughly that she can do whatever she likes and people will still blame Hollywood. She returns from time to time, mostly to be reproachful, to share the unspoken memories of an age of loneliness, of madness. Morgana loves her, at least as best as she can still love anyone, and doesn’t remind Aithusa that if she hadn’t made this choice, she’d be all alone.
“Do you miss him?” Morgana asks.
She’s hugging her knees to her chest, not cold because she doesn’t feel that anymore but thinking about it, and Merlin is looking at his fingernails.
They’ve slid in and out of each other’s lives over the centuries: sometimes vanishing for decades, sometimes, like now, living on top of each other. Morgana has never figured out which one she hates more, which one is supposed to be the punishment.
“What kind of a question is that, Morgana?” Merlin asks at last, shreds of exasperation in his voice. “Really.”
It’s late for Merlin, for his dull office job of papercuts and watercoolers; he should probably be sleeping, but instead he’s curled up on his sofa looking defensive and somehow too small. Morgana doesn’t like it; for some reason, she prefers it when he’s being quietly obnoxious, a passive-aggressiveness practiced within castle walls and carried on through the years.
She sighs, and determines that one of these years they’re going to have to get away from one another.
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
Mordred is more interested in his iPhone than in Morgana, which is frankly par for the course by now.
“Everyone else got older,” Morgana remarks in a vaguely accusing fashion.
He deigns to flick his eyes up from the screen. “You don’t age anymore because you died, and Merlin still looks about twenty-five.”
“You still look eighteen,” Morgana reminds him. “I mean, didn’t you want to look a little more mature? You have to get me to buy alcohol for you half the time.”
Mordred tuts softly, attention already back on Temple Run.
“If you can tell me why I’m still here then I’ll tell you why I haven’t got any older,” he tells her, like he always does.
The world has a better understanding of itself by now, but magic has remained eternally mysterious. Morgana has tried asking Aithusa, but either she doesn’t know or she doesn’t want to tell. It can be either when it comes to dragons, although there’s also the horrible third option: that it isn’t time for them to know yet.
Morgana still dreams the future sometimes; not as often as she did when she was younger and her powers were trying to fight their way to the surface, and not with any kind of clarity, but there are pieces of something there that flicker in threads through her subconscious. Nothing that she can properly slot together into an actually helpful vision, but something is coming, something hasn’t happened yet.
Mordred’s never shown much interest, no matter how many times she tells him this. He has his own talents, of course, but he’s passed out the other side of decades of ostentatiousness, and how he’s simply content to eat Pringles and watch terrible TV and live on and on and on and on.
Morgana can’t hide from what she is. Not with the blackout curtains protecting her windows, her perpetually cold skin, and her quiet but omnipresent need for blood. She gave up the last of her humanity, and has the Buffy The Vampire boxed set hidden under her bed to prove it.
“You wouldn’t like it if I got older,” Mordred observes absently, his little runner finally crashing into a tree and breaking his concentration. “You like that you have this slightly weird Demi Moore thing going on.”
She makes a mental note to hex the next cup of coffee Merlin brings him.
The problem with Avalon – well, no, one of the many, many problems with Avalon – is that it doesn’t stay in the same place for very long, and once it’s been somewhere, it never returns.
Avalon is more of a state of mind than anything else, as Morgana has explained repeatedly to Merlin, and she has no idea how she found it in the first place.
The last months of Arthur’s life, and all the shit that went down around what was technically his death (it was much more complicated than that, and no matter how many books they scour neither she nor Merlin can accurately explain it), are sometimes pin-sharp in her memory, sometimes lazy smears that she can hardly believe happened at all. Time and magic and guilt are funny that way.
Arthur sleeps in Avalon; dead and not quite dead. Hibernating. Dormant.
Lazy, Mordred said once. It stung, but Merlin only laughed. It’s possible that all this time has driven Merlin crazy.
Basically, Arthur is gone, and the only reason that they’ve all stopped blaming each other is that it never got them anywhere.
Evil is relative, whatever anyone else says, and to simply label someone evil displays a certain lack of imagination, as far as Morgana is concerned.
It took Merlin a long, long time to forgive her enough. What they have now is a less awkward now than it was when it first began, the two of them eying each other suspiciously in locked rooms where they wouldn’t be able to inadvertently kill any innocent bystanders – Morgana’s never cared for them, but Merlin has always been frustratingly good, whatever that really means anymore – and exchanging words sharpened by years of bitterness.
It’s possible that they’ll actually kill each other one day down the line, that the only place this is leading is some kind of massacre, but it’s also possible that they can string this along for enough time that it won’t matter in the end. Morgana doesn’t bring it up anymore.
It’s been so long that Morgana has forgotten what it means to truly be evil, to hate so brilliantly and absolutely that it burns through you with utter resolution. She sometimes misses it; at least it nearly counted as a hobby.
They’ve lived so many lives it’s sometimes impossible to keep the stories straight. Morgana hasn’t aged a day since she died, still has the milky skin and clear eyes of youth, if you ignore the inhuman glitter that clings to her like the edges of razor blades. Her mind hasn’t succumbed to age either, but sometimes she still feels old, older than she’ll ever look.
Mordred isn’t sympathetic when he finds her prodding her features in the mirror, teeth exposed and angry.
“Well, you’ve still got great tits,” he says.
Morgana blinks, and he trips over and spills his mug of earl grey all over the carpet.
He mutters to himself as he leaves her to it, and for a moment Morgana recalls him pushing a knife between her ribs, the sting of mortality, what it felt like to still bleed. They’ve done worse things to each other since, but the first time still sticks in the memory.
Later, Merlin sits placidly at his desk – the surface is littered with empty Starbucks cups – and types away like he’s actually doing any work and says: “since you learned how to use a hairbrush you’ve looked much better.”
Morgana scowls. “You haven’t had a decent haircut since 1683.”
Merlin tips his head to one side while he thinks, and Morgana is relieved that she’s not the only one who has to take a moment to peel back the years, the various identities they’ve shared together and apart. Not that she’ll ever admit this aloud, of course.
“I thought I did alright in the nineteenth century,” he suggests mildly.
“That was a wig,” Morgana reminds him, propping her feet up on the edge of his desk. Merlin’s mouth thins a little, but he doesn’t comment.
After a while, Morgana sighs. “Being a vampire looks so much easier on TV.”
They say that Arthur will return when Albion needs him.
Morgana actually has a list of questions about this statement, ranging from a) Albion technically doesn’t exist anymore in a recognisable form, so isn’t that going to be somewhat awkward all the way through to m) it was next to impossible to get Arthur to Albion in the first place, and that was with a variety of different magical practitioners: how the hell is he going to get back on his own, with a few facetious ones thrown in for variety like r) is he still going to be a prat?
“I returned,” Morgana told Merlin once, drunk and tired and blood still under her fingernails, “I returned like this.”
Merlin pretended not to hear her, but they spent the next few months watching every zombie movie LoveFilm could give them anyway. It hasn’t awarded Morgana any sort of clarity, but she at least knows to be armed with a shovel and maybe a few seasons of The Walking Dead.
The worst part of knowing that Arthur will return – whenever that happens, and in whatever form he’s in – is that Morgana will have to face him again. She has notebooks full of scribbles, a pin-sharp mind and several centuries’ worth of popular culture, but she still has no idea what she’s going to say to him.
“You’re not a werewolf, are you?” Morgana asks Mordred, simply because she’s running out of immortality-causing ideas.
Mordred frowns a little. “Don’t you think you’d have noticed by now?”
Morgana shrugs. “I think you overestimate how much attention I actually pay to you.”
“She’s very self-centred,” Merlin agrees, and Morgana flickers a quick hex in his direction that he deflects without blinking, sending a shelf of DVDs crashing to the floor.
Mordred is pouting, because he’s been a teenager for a long, long time by now. Sometimes, Morgana imagines what it must be like to be permanently stuck in that hormonal maelstrom, but she always stops quickly afterwards. It’s not a nice thought, and one of the rules of her existence is that she can’t pity Mordred, it can’t work like that.
“You’re both self-centred,” he counters, and now it’s Merlin’s turn to look annoyed. “You’re not only waiting for Arthur,” Mordred points out.
“What about you?” Morgana asks, hoping that this isn’t going to end in a fight that blows up her flat and necessitates another century of them all having to stay away from each other. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“You both asked for this,” Mordred reminds them, waving a vague hand. “I didn’t.”
He has them there, of course.
“Well,” Morgana manages at last, “I wouldn’t have asked for this if I’d known the truth.”
“About being a vampire?” Merlin arches an eyebrow.
“About forever,” she corrects.
“Ah.” Merlin nods, a smile tugging the corner of his mouth; still, just a little, that boy who stumbled into Camelot with no idea that he was about to change the course of the world.
The truth about forever? Oh, that’s easy.
The truth about forever is that it doesn’t ever stop.