Work Text:
read me your tombstone
tell me you're sorry, fax me your will
you owe me something still
blood is like water
the bath that you poured me
has drained and it’s gone…
The Cardigans—Don’t Blame Your Daughter (Diamonds)
Arthur’s father has given him three things.
Firstly, there is the absence of love.
Secondly, lies.
Thirdly—all too late—the love for his people.
As the years pass, Arthur thinks back and remembers untruths and the presence of something that is not love, equally as cold as the biting chill of winter on his cheeks in the early morning wind.
He begins forgetting that there has ever been anything beyond that.
---
The tremor sits in the marrow of his finger bones, his knuckles, skin whitened with the tension and the force of gripping the hilt of his sword too tightly. There is not a single sound in the room; outside, everything is still. Inside, a tempest rages, a tempest made of boiling blood that thunders through his veins, clouding his sight and deafening his ears. It may be the saline water in his eyes that is the cause for his father’s pallid, terror-slackened face to blur and contort into something indistinguishable before him. For the first and only time in his life, Arthur finds himself glad of tears.
Patricide is easier to commit when the face he sees could belong to anyone.
There is a jarring sound from somewhere behind him, but Arthur does not notice it. He is focused on those wide eyes, no doubt horrified at what they witness. Had he been thinking clearly, Arthur would not have felt any different. Killing in battle for defence and killing wilfully for retribution are two different matters. Arthur has known this, once. He does not know now.
---
Arthur was seven when he awoke one morning, a wondrous sense of ease sitting snugly in his chest. He knew, without a doubt, that today was his mother’s birthday. He wanted to celebrate.
So he gathered his courage and braved his father. Of course, he felt foolish immediately after opening his mouth. “She is dead since your birth.” His father scoffed. Cold voice, cold eyes—cold chest. “There is nothing to celebrate.”
“But,” Arthur said, and that was as far as he ever came.
“Your mother is gone, Arthur,” his father said, words final, resolute. He turned around, going back to his paper work. “And now, be foolish no more and do not accost me with such unseemly matters.”
There was silence.
Then Arthur spluttered, “She’s gone because you make her!” At that moment, every inch of him was a seven year old child wanting nothing else than to revere his mother’s memory.
His father raised his face, ever so slowly. “Excuse me?” he said, mildly, not looking at Arthur. All the blood drained from little Arthur’s face. “Would you care to repeat yourself?”
Arthur knew that voice. He knew that if he apologised now, he would only be in for arrest—a few days at most. Because if he apologised, his father forgave him. It was the only gesture of warmth his father held for him.
But Arthur did not. He had apologised last year, and the year before that. He had hated himself for insulting his mother’s memory by being a coward.
So he jutted his chin out and glared up at his father, balled his small hands into fists and tried his hardest to ignore how wobbly his legs were.
“I said,” Arthur said, petulantly, defiantly, “that she is gone because you make her!”
He really should have expected the slap. Touching his split lip with his fingers, he stared breathlessly at the blood, a smeared red spot on his pale skin, and hardly felt the sting.
Afterwards, his cries and anger subsided only slowly. Three hours of continuous screaming later, and his throat was hoarse, his eyes burning and dry.
Even though he was too young to understand the pity in the nursemaid’s eyes, he instinctively despised it. He evaded her grip; rather than letting himself be held in a caring embrace, he cowered down in the corner of his room, trembling with rage and disdain, shying away from her like a wounded animal. His eyes were narrowed.
“Leave me alone,” he hissed as she tried to come closer. “Now.”
Gaze wide and attentive, the nursemaid disobeyed. She crouched in front of him, holding his hand out.
“Come here,” she said, patiently. “You must be tired.”
“I’m not,” he spat defensively, lying. In truth, he was tired. He had been kicking and screaming for hours, had fought off hands that tried to hold him down, had run, heart puckering wildly away in his chest, through the entire castle on his tiny legs to just be alone.
“You are,” the nursemaid said in her kind tone, shifting in her crouch, moving her fingers in the way she did with kittens.
“I’m not,” he repeated loudly, in an attempt to make her listen. Even though he was a prince, nobody ever seemed to do that. He was seven years old, and he held a sword. People had to listen.
“But you are,” she said, the kindness shifting into something softer, calmer. Arthur did not know it was tenderness as he had never heard it before. But he reacted anyway, helpless to the childish desire for closeness and warmth as his throat constricted and his knees began to tremble. Eyes widening a fraction, he opened his mouth soundlessly, stared at her, transfixed by this new smooth and low tone of her voice. “And I’m sorry. I know it’s hard. I want to make it better, so you don’t have to cry anymore.” Silence. Arthur stared, wanted to believe her. Almost crept forward.
Then, gently, “Let us go to bed, Arthur.”
He flinched back immediately, as if burnt.
A lie.
“No,” he forced out after a moment, shaking his head. “I am going to bed,” he said, voice growing loud and high with emotion. His throat hurt. “You will go somewhere else. You always go somewhere else.” He tried to say it stoutly but his voice broke, fears and loneliness making it crack and drag out the word ‘always,’ making it sound unbearably soft.
His eyes widened as his breath got stuck in his throat, and suddenly his arms began to tremble. There were tremors in his chest, wracking his entire tiny frame with fierce shudders. He found himself breathing in heavily as he lost control over his body. It was hard to breathe, and a hiccup escaped him, and another, and another, as he drew his knees up to his chest. He clutched at his legs, terrified. He had never understood what was happening to him, but the man with the long grey hair said he should try to breathe. It was not easy. It never was, when terror froze his lungs into immobility, when panic clawed viciously at his throat to let each intake of breath escape through the lacerated skin.
There was never enough air. There was never enough space.
He was choking on all the lies.
“I-I-I am a-a-always going to be-e-ed alone,” he whined through chattering teeth, voice shrill and childish through the stutter. His body was jolting, and he pressed himself further against the wall behind him. The bricks dug into his back, a blunt pain. There was no air. “Do-o-on’t l-lie to m-me!”
“I am not lying, dear,” the nursemaid said, frowning. Her hands were shaking, and she was anxious to come closer and hold him still. If he did not breathe, he would black out again; he was a gasping, terrified mess, breathing interrupted by violent hiccups. “Come here, I will make it better,” she said at last, emphatically, deciding that the hyperventilating, hysteric child in front of her could not be reasoned with by anything else than force.
Arthur’s eyes followed her movements, and as she almost touched him, he suddenly began shrieking—giving the last of his air for an ear-shattering, broken crescendo. He tried to stumble further back, but there was only the wall left, so he kicked his legs out at her, fiercely, furiously. His boot hit her forearm in a harsh, unforgiving strike, and she yelled, shrank back.
Before Arthur blacked out on the stone floor, he could see the doors bang open, guards swarming in.
His father—the king, the king—was not among them.
---
Arthur never was allowed to celebrate his mother’s birthday. He never was allowed to ask about her. For all he knew, she was nothing more than a ghost, accompanying him everywhere he went. It hurt. Sometimes he felt inhumane with the impossible guilt crushing his shoulders, as heavy as the weight of the world that Atlas had to bear.
His father made sure to repeat “She died at your birth,” every year that he asked.
He slept alone at night.
---
“Arthur, no!” A voice from somewhere in the back, rough and loud. “Don’t! I know you don’t want to do this!”
“My mother—” Arthur begins harshly, before halting. The pain that is each breath is interrupted, for precisely three seconds, by the familiar presence of Merlin that he cannot help but acknowledge. Then it returns to him with a violence that is agonizing, and it lurches through him with the force of the Gods’ wrath for Prometheus: the eternal damnation that he thought he could never escape. A grimace distorts his mouth into a grim line. “—is dead because of him!”
“Killing your father won’t bring her back,” says Merlin, and Arthur hates him at this moment, hates him so profoundly that it almost startles him out of his pain. His right eye twitches, and his jaw begins to hurt with the pressure of grinding his teeth. “You’ve lost one parent—do you really want to lose another?”
If Arthur’s long suppressed emotions were not focused so obsessively, single-mindedly on the worthless trash below him, he would turn to Merlin to strike him across the face. How dare he speak these words, how dare he bare Arthur like that? If it were anyone else but Merlin, Arthur would have struck him down, cut that throat to forever silence. He is not impartial to truth, has long forgotten the virtue of it as he has closed his heart away. Truth may be painful, ugly and unwanted. In this case, Arthur finds it to be all of these.
He does not want it to be true. This man in front of him is not his father, has never been.
“Listen to him, Arthur,” says Uther, calm and breathless.
Oh God, that voice. That voice, those words—the lies. All the lies, and they make Arthur physically want to recoil. He reacts instinctively, does not permit this liar to tell more untruths. His hand jerks forward to press the tip of his sword harder into Uther’s chest; a warning. Dangerous, deadly. There is no patience left in the heat of Arthur’s ire now.
But no; no, it is not Merlin he wants strike down. After all, Merlin speaks the truth, always has. This man before him—this king, this king has made him serve a liar, all these years. Arthur cannot, will not serve a liar.
Disgust and dread fill him, sickly. He grits his teeth harder, waits for his jaw bone to snap under the force.
There is a moment of silence, in which the blood rushes madly in his ears. His hand on the hilt of the sword is trembling, imperceptibly exerting pressure. Arthur, in this moment, wants nothing more than to move his hand forward, to end this godforsaken nightmare once and for all.
It is only Merlin’s words which keep him from running the blade straight through Uther’s heart.
“Arthur, please,” Merlin says, heavily. “Put the sword down.”
“You heard what my mother said,” Arthur grits out roughly, words foul and bitter. He has forgotten himself; momentarily he does not know which day it is, which month or year. He knows, though, that he has believed to have been born a murderer, that he has believed to have to atone for it his entire life—he has sworn to himself he would serve the king, would serve the people the best he knew how. He is a prince, the only heir to the throne and the only future of the kingdom. Even if he may have felt the urge to stab himself, just to make it the guilt go away, he could not, never will be able to. He is a servant, a servant to his people, and even if he wanted to, the responsibility is forever his.
But he does not care that it is the king before him, and whether the words are true or not, he cannot say. There is nothing true in Arthur’s world anymore, and he wonders if there has ever been. The words the king has spoken to him certainly never were, and even if prince Arthur should know better than to trust a sorceress’ words, the man does not. He may still be the prince, but the prince is warring with Arthur’s innermost self that consists of two halves: one is the child that has never let go of the loss, that has never accepted his guilt, and the other half is the young man Arthur has grown into, whose only experience of love has been the love he holds for his people.
“After everything he has done—do you think he deserves to live? He executes those who use magic, and yet he has used it himself!” The utter contempt he holds for the king has once frightened him, but no more. For once, he allows himself to speak the truth, voice thick and strong with the righteous force of all his father’s victims as they speak through him. “You—have caused so much suffering. And pain.”
Sometimes, at night, Arthur still hears the screams, faint echoes in his head that haunt him, and when he opens his mouth, there is the distinct impression of something like saltwater on his dry lips—like tears. It is unfair. It is unfair and unjust, and he has remained silent for too long. If Arthur has to become a murderer now, he will. There is nothing left to lose.
He will strike down the man that has never been his father coldly, ruthlessly. He must do so before the remorse returns.
It is not his father, he must remind himself, but the king. And if this king dies, he will be next.
And he will make it better. He will make it better for all of those that have suffered, will repent the wrought misdeeds, all the crime, and he will restore the name of justice to its former glory.
“I will put an end to that,” he says, words final, peremptory.
(It has never been so enticing, the idea of killing someone else. One strike, and his shoulders would be lighter, and he could stand straighter, finally having revenged his mother.
If it were true, he could.
He does not want to think about how it almost makes too much sense.)
Arthur is breathing heavily, chest heaving. His fingers twitch around the hilt of the sword.
It is only Merlin’s words which make him halt.
“Morgause is lying,” Merlin says, finally, as though he has come to a conclusion. Suddenly, the silence in Arthur’s ears becomes deafening, rings loudly in its absence. For some reason, the words are daggers, three stabs straight into Arthur’s lower belly, where the skin is the softest—twisting, twisting, twisting. “She is an enchantress. She tricked you.”
The familiar voice washes in a wave of distress over his back, and Arthur shudders underneath his armour, his useless, useless armour. There is no defence against Merlin’s voice, his words, his presence. No defence at all, and Arthur feels foolish for trying.
If it were anyone else but Merlin, Arthur would have struck him down. He is not impartial to truth, has long forgotten the virtue of it as he has closed his heart away. Truth may be painful, ugly and unwanted. In this case, Arthur finds it to be all of these.
But Merlin is honest; Merlin always, always speaks the truth, and Arthur is appalled. Appalled at how he wants to but cannot stop listening with the words echoing in his head.
Echo, echo, echo. Morgause is lying. It is you who is wrong.
“That was not your mother you saw; that was an illusion,” Merlin says, and something about his words is unsure, hesitant. Arthur, for a fleeting second, thinks Merlin is speaking against his will. Something is off about what Merlin is saying. Arthur wants to shake his head against them, wants to make them go away, yet he finds himself listening anyway. He wants to hold on to the one possibility that it is not his fault, to be able to spend a few more moments in this improbable, fantastic, weightless tale.
But Merlin’s words fester, fasten onto his muscles, engulfing them like a thin blanket, make them soften. They make Arthur soften as they penetrate his mind; almost Arthur wants to close his eyes to shield himself from the only truth in his life.
The truth is this: Merlin is the only person in the world to hold such profound power over him. Before Merlin, Arthur is no more than a simple-minded man with too much weight on his shoulders, too many things locked behind bars. Before Merlin, he is laid as bare and naked as the day he has been born, the day he has killed his first human being.
Before Merlin, there is nothing he could possibly hide. Not even this abysmal, terrifying fate.
(He knows it is too easy to be true. He knows.)
“Everything…”
Arthur swallows heavily. A surge of fear slams into his chest, makes his body freeze. He almost closes his eyes again, feels so pathetically afraid of Merlin’s next words. The pause stretches on for a long while.
Then Merlin continues, slowly and thickly, “Everything your mother said to you—those were Morgause’s words.”
“You don’t know that!” Arthur barks, voice rough and gravelly (high-pitched, feeble and pleading).
For once in his life, he wants, needs someone to lie to him.
Merlin does not, will not permit Arthur to become a liar—will not permit him to become his father. Merlin continues on, as ruthlessly as he always does. “This has been her plan all along, to turn you against your father,” he says, abruptly. “And if you kill him, the kingdom will be destroyed. This is what she wants!”
Arthur’s nerves soak the words up and they melt into his bloodstream, melt into his nerves, and his arm holding the sword begins to tremble. He knows what Merlin is doing. Merlin is chasing his pain, pushing and pushing and pushing him to his limits so he would finally accept. Accept that there is no other way, that it is him, that it is him who is the murderer. And he knows he is. By God, he knows. He knows.
“Listen to him,” Uther says suddenly, words hushed. His eyes are imploring and imperious all at once, and Arthur stares at them; fascinated, repelled. “He’s speaking the truth.”
Arthur wants to ask, Is he really?Are you?
There are only two things in his life that his father has ever given him. One of these things are lies; lies about everything and anything. How can he know that his father is not lying merely to save his own skin?
Arthur feels helpless against the conflicting feelings inside of him. He has a duty. His duty is to protect his people from harm. And if it is the king he needs to protect them from, so he will.
There is nothing true in Arthur’s world anymore, and he wonders if there ever has been.
It would be so easy—so easy to kill the king right here, right now. To end the nightmare, the guilt. To live another lie.
So easy.
“Arthur, please,” Merlin says, softly, from somewhere behind him.
And then Arthur wants to smile, wants to smile helplessly against the way Merlin’s plea wraps itself around his pain, soothing it like a salve over a fatal wound, slowly closing around it, allowing it to heal. Arthur inhales, and when he does, he lets go of the tears and they slide down his cheeks, burning the pale skin.
There is one true thing in his world, and Arthur has never hated and loved a thing as much as he hates and loves Merlin.
Merlin, who has seen him at his best, his worst. Who is impossibly brave and loyal and honest, who will deny Arthur when he is wrong. To whom stations mean nothing; to whom Arthur is no more than a simple man. And he curses and loves Merlin, curses and loves his keystone, without whom water would sicker into all the holes of his ship, would weigh it down, would drag it to the bottom of the sea where he would be left alone, incapable of breathing. Merlin has seen him at his best and worst, and Merlin will do this with him. There is no one else he needs to heal, to learn how to accept.
“Swear to me that it isn’t true,” Arthur rasps, almost feverish. Holding on to the last of his strength and will, he supports himself with his weight on the arm of his sword, pressing forward with his blade. A last warning. “You are not responsible for my mother’s death! Give me your word!”
And he stares into his father’s eyes, daring him to lie. He would think of how brilliant of a strategist his father is if he would not know the truth. Besides the lies, the other thing his father has ever given him is the absence of love.
The love that has, does and always will belong to his mother, instead of him.
“I swear on my life. I loved your mother,” Uther says, and Arthur knows, with all certainty, that this is no lie. It resonates in his bones, the rawness of Uther’s words, of Uther’s feelings.
A moment passes, and Uther’s mouth moves soundlessly. Arthur’s hand twitches on the hilt; Uther is not yet finished. “There isn’t a day that passes that I don’t wish she were still alive,” he says, low and quiet, and Arthur is sure of this, too. He has felt it himself. If the kingdom needed no heir, Arthur is certain that Uther would not hesitate to bring her back, even if it meant forsaking his own son.
And it gnaws at his conscience: the knowledge of the absoluteness of Uther’s emotions, the lengths he would go to for this dead person. The length he has gone for this dead person. The force, the depth with which he loves.
It troubles him, scares him, to think that, in this respect, he is no different from his father.
“I could never have done anything to hurt her,” Uther says in a rush, too quick, too hastened. Too haunted, if the depth of despair in his eyes is anything to go by. Arthur swallows the saliva in his mouth, swallows the thought that this is not entirely true, that this is a lie of omission, a half-truth.
As the years have passed, he has forgotten the last thing his father has ever given him; it returns to him now. Lies, the absence of love, and the love for his people.
For his people, his father would do anything.
For his people, his father has done everything.
Sacrificing his own love to give the kingdom a future. Even if it meant living his life in abysmal, incomprehensible guilt, alone.
And Arthur finds himself to be cruel, because he does not end his father’s live. He subjects the man to another lifetime of a guilt that would pain him so intensely that it would make him feel inhumane. Arthur wants redemption.
His father must continue to bear it, and he would bear it alone until it would corrode him with madness from the inside.
The shock of emotion becomes too much, and his legs buckle beneath him, and he goes down to his knees, defeated and exhausted. His sword falls with a heavy clang, and a sob tears through his chest, forceful and vindictive, and Arthur whines high in his throat, clutches hard at the armrest of the throne, the only connection to reality that is left.
Uther’s hands in his hair are unreal, and Arthur does not feel it. Does not want to feel them, because he leaves Uther alone in his grief, because it is what Uther deserves.
And when Uther speaks, Arthur is so far gone that he does not hear him.
“My son,” Uther says, voice cracked and broken, merely a shadow of the formerly present regality. This is a ghost speaking, a man who has not found the courage to continue living. “You—you mean more to me than anything,” Uther chokes out.
For once in his life, Uther speaks the truth.
Arthur’s loud and heavy sobs drown the words out, so they never reach him. Uther’s love never has and never will Arthur.
Arthur repays him in kind; his lonely beginning for his father’s lonely end.