Work Text:
In the years to come, Merlin begins to forget.
Gradually. Gradually, so he doesn’t notice. Forgetting is an impossibility for him; how could he possibly forget the reason he’s still here? Still here, still waiting? He cannot forget. Even though sometimes, when he wakes in the night, he wishes he could, wishes that gaping hole in his chest would open a little further so he would plunge down and see nothing but darkness, at last. He wants to see darkness in its entirety, not just its parts. The darkness is the loss that tastes like stale water on his tongue, feels like dead leaves on the back of his hand. Rough; dry; lifeless. He still feels the motion of the wind against his face, but not its chill.
It becomes his obsession, becomes everything he sees. The angle of the corner of a mouth so familiar on a stranger’s face. The flutter of a red cloak from the corner of his eye that he ignores by day, chases by night. That peculiar emphasis on the first syllable of his name from the wrong mouth. The shade of the sea at sunrise a brilliant echo of eyes forever closed.
The loss manifests itself in the shape of Arthur’s ghost at his side. After that, the ghost becomes all he can remember, because it is easier to talk to an echo instead of a corpse that is now nothing more but dust in the wind.