Chapter Text
At night, when Merlin feels like he can’t breathe because the darkness is swallowing his lungs and heart, he clutches his pillow, looks up at the wainscoted ceiling and counts down from 100.
Gaius doesn’t know. Gaius doesn’t see well enough anymore to notice the blue-purple bruises that cover the twelve-years-old’s arms, and Merlin doesn’t tell. He keeps his mouth shut and his emotions under lock and key. He’s teacher scolds him to stop being so mean to other children. He can’t help it.
His mother Hunith was put into rehab several times, while Merlin would live with his uncle in Ealdor, but as soon as she was released, she would start using again, ending up on the living room floor at three in the morning, eyes turned back into her head, a relaxed smile on her face and a trail of blood down her forearm.
Merlin would grab her shoulders and shake her, trying to get her to wake from her drug-induced sleep, but she would just order him to leave and “play or something” – if she woke up at all.
In times like these, the raven-haired boy would run across half the village to Will’s or Gaius’, searching their kitchen cabinets for something edible. Will, who’s one year older than him, would scold him to be quiet, but he not once did he tell him to go away. Gaius would give him cookies and apples, have that worried, sad look on his face, send an ambulance to his sister’s flat and walk him home.
And one night, he didn’t send him back.
Merlin visited a shrink for about half a year and then, everything seemed to be back in order.
Except, Gaius doesn’t know. Not about his nightly panic attacks and the sudden feeling to be surrounded by cotton, nor that he beats up younger kids on the way home. Merlin doesn’t know why he does that, why it seems to give a strange feeling of control, a calm that hugging his pillow doesn’t come close to. He threatens them not to tell anyone, but it’s not like they would anyway. He’s not very intimidating to them, and he knows that. That’s why they don’t snitch – they want to take revenge themselves. For them, it’s just a game. They attack him in packs and kick him until he wheezes for air or wets himself. But the next day, he’ll still wait for one of them behind a dumpster.
He’s often tried to get some love from his mother; hugging her when she was cleaning the kitchen or trying to kiss her cheek when she was crying, but she’d always push him away, until he didn’t want closeness anymore, until a cold anger filled his mind and every heartbeat felt like painful drum.
When someone, that is Gaius or the school nurse, tries to touch him now, he shies away. Their attempts to console him feel alien. He hates their touches. They’re too close, always too close.
It’s two years later in July when Gaius passes away. Although he’s quite old, it’s unexpected. He hasn’t been weak or ill, and the effect it has on Merlin is devastating.
Merlin comes home from school at three in the afternoon and the old man’s bedroom door is still closed and the fear that bubbles up in his stomach feels like an explosion. He opens the door but remains outside the room.
“Gaius?” he calls hesitantly and doesn’t dare to move. Moving might cause his clothes to rustle, and then he could miss his uncle’s answer. When there’s no response, he walks into the kitchen to cook himself dinner.
He’s sitting in front of his geometry homework, head in hands. His teacher has threatened to have a very serious talk with him if he turns up without it, but his fingers tremble too much to hold a pen and he’s too busy trying not to think about Gaius’ lifeless body in the other room to focus on circles and squares.
He calls Will in the middle of the night when his limbs feel oddly cold and foreign and because he feels like he can’t breathe.
“Merlin, it’s two a.m.…”
“Please. I don’t know what to do.”
“Alright, but get to the point. I’m fuckin’ tired.” Others would’ve probably thought of Will as rude, but Merlin has always valued his straight-forwardness.
“Gaius is dead.”
Will’s arrives twenty minutes later, panting and sweating from running. He calls the police; he holds Merlin as he blankly stares at the ambulance driving away, body rigid and eyes dry; he helps him to apply for the right foster family project while Merlin is chewing on his nails.
People in suits collect him and his few belongings. They tell him that everything is going to be alright, that things will pass, but he doesn’t believe them.
Three years later, when Merlin has just turned fifteen, a family living in Camelot stoops to taking him in – and it’s a weird one. There’s the father, Aredian, a stern man who works all the time, his wife Morgause with a warm smile on her lips but a hand quick to punish, their adopted son Mordred and their biological daughter Eira. They all don’t seem to like Merlin very much, but he gets used to their glares quickly and learns to lock his room at night after Mordred wants to have sex with him two weeks after he’s moved in.
His bedroom is sparsely furnished; there’s his bed, a small desk with chair, his wardrobe and a stained carpet. A reflection of my soul, he thinks with a bitter smile when he first properly looks at it.
He never loses contact to Will – not really. They write back and forth every two weeks or so, but his friend now lives in London and helps out in his mother’s shop, so they don’t really see each other anymore. He tells Merlin about his girlfriend and about his new friends – and Merlin finds himself looking less and less forward to their conversations.
After changing schools, he stops with the fighting, but he still gets so angry sometimes. Unlike to when he was younger, he manages to keep it inside with the help of any drug he can get his hands on, until at some point it turns into sadness. Then, he tends to lie in his room, stare at the wall and try to forget his mother’s judging face. “Do you want to become like me, Merlin? Do you really want to be like the person you hate most?”
He doesn’t care about her – he has no idea, where she is or if she’s even still alive. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t care, I don’t care. It’s what he tells himself every night before going to bed and every morning after waking up. She doesn’t deserve your worry.
One day during lunch break, a pretty girl with wonderfully kind eyes and hair so curly it reminds him of the turbulent sea approaches him shyly and asks if the seat next to him is already taken. Her name is Gwen and she becomes Merlin’s first friend after Will. They date for a while, but he soon realizes that women are not really his area and they decide to stay friends. Not once does she ask about why he doesn’t want to hold hands, or why he pushes her away when she gets too close. She just accepts it.
He invites her home one day, not thinking anything by it, but as soon as they’ve spent five minutes there, she urges him to go somewhere else. They end up in a deserted park in the middle of nowhere.
“Do they always look at you like that?”
Merlin shrugs. “We don’t like each other very much.”
“Are you adopted?” she asks carefully, this being the first time she’s asked him anything personal about himself. She usually tends to fill the silence with pointless banter.
“No, no!” he immediately says. “They’re just my foster family. As soon as I’m eighteen, I’m out of there.”
Her face suddenly turns very sad. “If you don’t mind me asking, where are your parents?”
He feels rage rising in his throat and his nails dig into his palms. “My mother doesn’t care and my dad ran off before I was born, so…”
Gwen resists the urge of hugging him because she knows how much he despises it.
“Do they hit you?”
“No,” Merlin lies, and she sees right through it, “They usually do their best to ignore me. Mordred likes to touch my crotch a lot. I think, he’s into me.” He tried for a grin but it quickly melts from his face when he notices the tear tracks on his friend’s face.
“That’s horrible, Merlin. You need to talk to your counsellor about this.” She grabs his hand and squeezes it, hard. I can’t, he wants to say, but the words get stuck behind the lump in his throat. Gwen’s hand warm and her eyes are so soft yet so angry. She starts rubbing the back of his hand with the pad of her thumb in circular motions, a calm rhythm, like ocean waves. He stares at the movement, a feeling of loneliness so painful in his chest that he wants to scream.
“Merlin?” Gwen says and frowns. “You’re crying.”
Merlin touches his cheeks and flinches at the wetness. He hasn’t wept in years – he usually pushes the tears deep, deep down and focuses on his bedroom wall.
And suddenly, he’s pulled into a tight embrace. He buries his face in the crook of her neck and waits until the tears cease. For some reason, her hug doesn’t feel disgusting. He never, ever wants to leave this nice warm place.
A few weeks later, he sits in his room, lonely, empty, exhausted. His finger hovers over the call button next to Gwen’s name. He presses it, then panics and cancels the call. As he repeats this process a few times, nearly getting a panic attack every time, he realises how hopeless this is. He won’t be able to bring himself to reach out to her. So he grabs the syringe under his mattress and fills it. The vein seems to be pulsating blue and desperate, in tune with his ragged breaths. This is it.
But he wakes up in hospital. Gwen’s sleeping on the chair next to him, the room is white and his vision blurry. He promises her never to do drugs again, but he knows he’s probably lying. The feeling of guilt that’s been growing in his chest ever since that day seems to be a fair price to pay for that.